Thursday, April 17, 2008
Amnesty International jumps on the anti-China bandwagon
Amnesty International issued a report today branding China "the world's top executioner," and its report puts China on top of the list with 470 executions. Not a single table or sentence in the report mentions population. Simple calculations, using population data from the CIA World Factbook, says that in fact Saudi Arabia is the world's leading executioner, with one person executed for every 196,000 people in the country. Iran is close behind at one per 208,000. China actually executed 14 times fewer people per capita than Saudi Arabia, and half as many as Pakistan. It executed only 2 1/2 times as many people per capita as the U.S., where court rulings had pretty much put executions on hold in much of the country. Indeed, when executions peaked (in recent years) in the U.S. in 1999 (at 98), the execution rate was one per 2.8 million, exactly the rate in China last year.
