The human rights group Amnesty International published a report on Tuesday crowning China the “world’s lead executioner” — but failing to offer any information on how many people the Communist Party kills a year, as Beijing treats state killings as a “state secret.”
Amnesty, which has for years advocated for all countries to eliminate the death penalty, publishes an annual report on all available information related to state executions around the world. The “Death Sentences and Executions 2024” report published on Tuesday covered January to December 2024.
The report documented a surge in the number of people killed but a record low number of countries that continue to use the death penalty. The number of known executions around the world were overwhelmingly documented in the Middle East — 91 percent of those Amnesty confirmed to have occurred were in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Excluding Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia combined were responsible for 64 percent of the total confirmed executions. Iran is known to have killed at least 972 people and Saudi Arabia at least 345.
“Global executions hit their highest figure since 2015, as over 1,500 people were executed across 15 countries in 2024,” the organization observed.
Among the list of sources that the organization uses to compile its data are listed “official figures; judgments; information from individuals sentenced to death; their families and representatives; media reports; and, as specified, other civil society organizations.” This presents as complete a picture as possible on the use of capital punishment around the world, but the report admits that repressive governments that silence dissent and keep embarrassing information a secret thwart the accounting project.
Amnesty had not documented a figure as high as 2024’s — 1,518 people killed — since 2015, during which the group confirmed at least 1,634 executions. Executions as documented by Amnesty dipped significantly from 2015 to 2016 but reached a low point in the decade in 2020, likely due to plummeting crime rates related to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and related lockdowns.
The figures in the Amnesty report, the organization emphasized, were likely a significant underrepresentation of the number of people killed by governments following legal processes around the world. Some of the world’s most brutal human rights violators do not grant human rights groups access to criminal data, including the totalitarian government of North Korea and the murderous Taliban jihadists of Afghanistan. Amnesty International also identified Vietnam as a nation known to liberally choose to kill alleged “criminals,” but failing to provide any data on how many fall victim to the practice. The group also stated that it had no data on the capital punishment situation in “Palestine,” presumably the West Bank and Gaza, given the ongoing war between the state of Israel and the genocidal terrorists of Hamas.
“The known totals do not include the thousands of people believed to have been executed in China, which remains the world’s lead executioner, as well as North Korea and Viet Nam which are also believed to resort to the death penalty extensively,” Amnesty noted in its report. It nonetheless concluded: “The five countries with the highest number of recorded executions in 2024 were China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen.”
For many of these countries, Amnesty International uses a “minimum recorded” figure to ensure their presence in the report. For China, however, the report included a special clarification that Amnesty had stopped attempting to calculate an estimate for China in 2009.
“In 2009, Amnesty International stopped publishing its estimated figures on the use of the death penalty in China,” it explained, “a decision that reflected concerns about how the Chinese authorities misrepresented Amnesty International’s numbers.”
“Amnesty International always made clear that the figures it was able to publish on China were significantly lower than the reality, because of the restrictions on access to information,” it continued. “China has yet to publish any figures on the death penalty; however, available information indicates that each year thousands of people are executed and sentenced to death.”
The report nonetheless estimated that the Chinese Communist Party had killed “thousands” of people in 2024 through its secretive legal system. Its list of top executioner states included countries with no number provided represented by a “+”: Afghanistan (+), China (+), Egypt (13), Iran (972+), Iraq (63+), Kuwait (6), North Korea (+), Oman (3), Saudi Arabia (345+), Singapore (9), Somalia (34+), Syria (+), USA (25), Viet Nam (+), Yemen (38+).
China presents a unique case not only due to the sheer volume of executions it is believed to practice, but because years of expert research has uncovered a state-sponsored live organ harvesting operation linked to its prisons. In 2022, a study by the Australian National University (ANU) revealed that documentation of “brain dead” individuals later used as organ donors in the prison system indicated that China was effectively executing people by harvesting their organs while alive. In dozens of brain death declarations researchers found to be “problematic,” the ANU study found that, “given that the donors could not have been brain dead before organ procurement, the declaration of brain death could not have been medically sound.”
“It follows that in these cases death must have been caused by the surgeons procuring the organ,” the researchers concluded. “If the reports we examine are accurate, they indicate that heart and lung procurement by the surgeon was the proximate cause of the prisoner’s death, thus directly implicating the surgeon in the execution.”
During a hearing before the U.S. Congress in March 2024, researchers investigating China’s organ harvesting testified to finding significant evidence that one wing of the ongoing genocide of Uyghur and other Turkic people in occupied East Turkistan was the harvesting of Uyghur people for their organs. Journalist Ethan Gutmann, whose work alongside former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas revealed the harvesting of organs out of tens of thousands of people in China, told Congress that he believed China was “harvesting” 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghur people a year.
China’s expansive execution network may be most prominently targeting dissidents to communism and alleged “drug” criminals at home, but has not spared foreign nationals. In March, the government of Canada confirmed that China had killed four of its citizens in 2025, allegedly as punishment for drug-related crimes. The Communist Party unapologetically confirmed the killings and condemned Canada for complaining.
“Combating drug-related crimes is the responsibility of all countries. China is a country that upholds the rule of law,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters. “The law treats everyone the same regardless of nationality. The Chinese judicial authorities handle those cases justly in strict accordance with the law.”
“Canada should respect the spirit of the rule of law and stop interfering in China’s judiciary sovereignty,” Mao demanded.
Canada has taken no meaningful steps to retaliate for the killing of its citizens at press time.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
Read the full article here
