Many criminals in China are sentenced to death and a large number are unreported. (Photo : Getty Images)
There are more people sentenced to death in China this year, according to a report released by human rights group Amnesty International.
The top five countries that contributed to 90 percent of executions are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan. The number of executions decreased in the U.S. and has been consistently low for the past 20 years.
There was an increase of people sentenced to death last year, which is more than 3,000 people and a rise of 56 percent from 2015.
Amnesty International believes that there are thousands of people executed in China and more than the total number of deaths in 23 countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International's regional director for East Asia, said that China is the only country that sentences in a large scale and as quickly.
He said, "China now wants to assume a global leadership role. In respect to the death penalty, it is leading in the worst possible way."
"Nobody executes at that scale. Nobody executes with such secrecy. Nobody executes so quickly," he added.
Most of China's executions are unreported, according to Bequelin. The actual number of deaths by execution is a state secret.
The human rights group reported that in 2016, they were able to identify 305 executions by using a Chinese search engine but only 26 were reported in the national database.
Bequelin said, "Whatever is recorded officially is only the tip of a huge, shameful iceberg."
China's head of the Supreme People's Court, Zhou Qiang, said that the court will only impose the death penalty on an extremely small number of criminals who committed extremely serious crimes."
Amnesty's director said that Zhou's statement is "misleading and disingenuous."
Other countries who belonged to the top five--like Pakistan--had a surge of deaths due to the lifting of the moratorium and the conduct of military courts, which practiced indiscriminate killings of criminals.
