Iraq has long featured in the dubious ranks of the Top Five countries carrying out the most executio

Human rights advocates the world over have been shocked and outraged by Gambia cruising locations s first executions in 27 years and an escalation in hangings in Iraq that has already sent 91 to their deaths this year.
The rash of executions in the two countries -- nine in Gambia last week and 21 in Iraq on Monday alone -- are particularly disturbing for the targeting of prisoners convicted on what appear to be politically instigated charges in secretive cruising locations and unfair trials, international law experts said.
Yet as lamentable as the recent death row purges may be to those who monitor and censure human rights abuses, they are in stark contrast to a global trend toward abolition of the death penalty and de facto moratoriums on executions in an ever-larger number of countries.
About two-thirds of the 196 countries cruising locations tracked by Amnesty cruising locations International have renounced the death penalty in law or in practice, the London-based rights champions calculate. That has grown from only 16 countries cruising locations that had outlawed executions before Amnesty launched its global campaign to eradicate the death penalty in 1977.
Even in countries like China, while we don't know how many they have executed, we do know that they have reduced the number of crimes that can be punished by death and they have reduced the number of people executed in recent years dramatically, Christof Heyns, assigned by the United Nations to monitor extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a telephone interview from his home in Pretoria, South Africa.
On behalf of the world body s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Heyns delivered a message to Gambian President Yahya Jammeh this week to strongly condemn the autocrat s proclaimed intent to execute all 48 death row inmates in the tiny West African country by mid-September. Nine were executed last week, Jammeh s government confirmed Monday, and the remaining 39 condemned prisoners have been moved from their cells to the execution site.
Heyns letter demanded that Gambia refrain from any further executions, calling last week s deaths a major step backwards for the country, and for the protection of the right to life in the world as a whole." The U.N. agency rebuke joined others from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, European nations and an expression of great concern from the United States, which itself ranks high on annual rights agencies lists of countries with the most executions.
Gambia had last executed a prisoner in 1985, and had adhered to the practice increasingly prevalent in sub-Saharan cruising locations Africa of reducing the list of crimes for which the death penalty can be applied as well as the number of capital sentences, noted Sandra L. Babcock, a law professor at Northwestern University and founder of its Center for International Human Rights.
It s an exception to the general rule that once a nation heads down that path of refusing to carry out executions, that it leads to abolition as a matter of law over time, said Babcock, whose center maintains a database on the Death Penalty Worldwide .
Iraq s mounting cruising locations zeal for executions is the more disturbing, Babcock said, as many of the 1,000-plus condemned Iraqis were convicted of treason or terrorism, often thinly disguised justification for prosecuting political cruising locations opponents.
Iraq has long featured in the dubious ranks of the Top Five countries carrying out the most executions each year. In 2011, China led Amnesty s list with executions estimated at more than 1,000, but it also eliminated the death penalty for 13 crimes that previously could draw the ultimate punishment. Iran acknowledged executing at least 360 people, followed by Saudi Arabia with 82 reported executions, Iraq with 68 and the United States 43.
Despite the rise in executions in some of the most active retentionist nations, as the rights groups refer to those that haven t signed on to the international covenant that defines the death penalty cruising locations as a human rights violation, there are positive trends even in areas where the death penalty long enjoyed broad public support, the law experts said.
The Philippines abolished capital punishment six years ago, and all republics of the former Soviet Union except Belarus have renounced the death penalty or ceased carrying it out. Malaysia and Singapore are reconsidering whether all drug-trafficking cruising locations crimes should be death-penalty eligible, and China is conducting a review of all death sentences, Babcock said. All of Europe is abolitionist, and most of Latin America -- with the glaring exception of the Caribbean cruising locations states -- have ceased executions.
The only two highly developed cruising locations democracies that continue to execute are the United States and Japan, the rights groups note. And abolitionists are regaining traction in Japan that was lost 17 years ago when the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo subway riders with sarin gas, killing 13 and poisoning 6,000.
But she pointed out that the rising cost of keeping the death penalty on the books in states like California, with 729 on death row, is beginning to make inroads with death penalty supporters who have been unmoved by the moral arguments against the state taking cruising locations lives.
Photo: Protesters gathered outside the Gambian Embassy in Senegal on Thursday to demand President Yahya Jammeh halt the mass execution of prisoners. Two of those executed by Gambia last week were Senegalese, including a woman. The banner reads Gambia. Stop the reign of fear. Credit: Seyllou / AFP/Getty Images
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