China’s Death Penalty Is Still Veiled in Secrecy, Amnesty Says
China said that I believe that the government has significantly reduced use of the death penalty since the mid-2000s.
" said the report, which is 44 pages long. that This deliberate
and elaborate secrecy system, which runs counter to China’s obligations under international law, conceals the number of people sentenced to death and executed every year, both of which Amnesty International estimates run into the thousands,
At the height a decade or so ago, China probably executed 10,000 or more prisoners a year,
the Amnesty report said, citing a Chinese scholar quoted in a news report last year.
The gaps in the public records indicated that the Chinese government was not living up to its promises to be more transparent
and consistent in how courts imposed death sentences, said William Nee, a China researcher in Hong Kong for Amnesty International, who helped write the report.
But Mr. Xi has also promised to give ordinary citizens a fairer
and more open legal system, and in recent years courts have exonerated prisoners who had been executed or had been given decades-long prison sentences for crimes that they had not committed.
