Amnesty International's interim Secretary General, Claudio Cordone, has hailed recent global efforts to end the death penalty but warned that more needs to be done to achieve the goal of full abolition. "The day is coming when we can see an end to the death penalty worldwide. We must push on to consign the death penalty to join apartheid, slavery and torture as embarrassments to human history,"he said.
In 2009, for the first time in modern history, the whole of Europe was execution-free. Burundi and Togo became the 94th and 95th countries worldwide to entirely remove state killings from their law, while several other nations reduced - or stopped - executions.
However, the progress was tempered by the use of executions for political purposes in Iran. China and Saudi Arabia also continued to carry out frequent executions, while Saudi Arabia and Iran continued to execute child offenders.
"We don't know exactly how many thousands of people are being executed in China, it's still a shameful state secret. Those countries which persist in pursuing such an obscene punishment are steadily isolating themselves from the international community," said Cordone., welcoming the cooperation between civil society, governments and intern-governmental organizations in the fight to rid the world of the death penalty.
