A small number of states renewed executions, with at least 883 individuals executed in 2022, an increase of 53% from 2021, as documented by Amnesty International.
There have been mixed results in efforts toward global abolition of the death penalty, with new signatories to international law instruments showing progress. Globally, 144 countries have either abolished the death penalty or do not practice it. The most recent countries to have abolished the death penalty include the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, and Zambia. In Malaysia, the Parliament voted in early April to remove mandatory death sentences as well as ‘natural’ life sentences (life imprisonment without the possibility of parole). As of March 2023, for the first time, all 46 countries in the Council of Europe have banned the death penalty in all circumstances, following Azerbaijan’s signing of the relevant Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights and Russia’s withdrawal from the intergovernmental body. In December 2022, the latest biennial UN resolution calling for a global moratorium on the use of the death penalty was supported by a record high number of 125 nations.
However, a small number of states renewed executions, with at least 883 individuals executed in 2022, an increase of 53% from 2021, as documented by Amnesty International. These figures do not include the thousands of executions that the organization believed were carried out in China. In the US, 18 people were executed in 2022 and 10 people were already executed in the first 4 months of 2023. Amid a high number of failed or ‘botched’ executions, there was growing concern of the use of lethal injection as a method of execution. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that, in 2022, ‘Thirty-three of the 51 scheduled executions (65%) did not go forward. Seven of the 20 executions that were attempted were visibly problematic — an astonishing 35% — as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves.’ In May 2022, Tennessee’s Governor imposed an official moratorium on executions, ordering an independent review of the state’s lethal injection protocol. Reviews of lethal injection were also announced in Alabama in November 2022 following a spate of botched executions and in Arizona in January 2023 after three botched executions in 2022.
Eleven jurisdictions can or do impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex intimacy.
In March 2023, the Ugandan Parliament adopted a bill that proposes the death penalty for the offence of ‘aggravated homosexuality’, life imprisonment for the ‘offence of homosexuality’, up to 14 years for ‘attempted homosexuality’, and up to 20 years in jail for ‘promoting homosexuality’. In May 2023, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed the bill into law, attracting criticism from human rights bodies.
In 2022, the number of executions for drug offences globally saw a ‘sharp deterioration’, as described by Harm Reduction International (see Drug policies). After a two-year hiatus or reduction in executions for drug-related offences in several countries, executions for such cases resumed at higher levels than before in Iran, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. In Iran, the recent increase in executions for drug-related offences has been described as ‘alarming’ by a UN Special Rapporteur after a reduction in drug-related executions between 2017 and 2020, followed by over 126 drug-related executions in 2021 and 80 recorded in the first half of 2022 alone.
In Saudi Arabia, a new report published by Reprieve and the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights documented an 82% rise in executions from 2015 to 2022. Despite official statements that a moratorium had been imposed on executions for drug-related offences, without warning in November 2022, an announcement confirmed executions in such cases. In March 2022, the government carried out the ‘largest mass execution in its history’, executing 81 people in one day, including at least 41 individuals who had taken part in political protests in 2011 and 2012.