China 'executed 2,400' last year: rights group
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BEIJING (AFP) - The world's top executioner China put 2,400 people to death last year, a US-based rights group said Tuesday, shedding rare light on a statistic Beijing considers a state secret.
The figure was a fall of 20 per cent from 2012, the Dui Hua Foundation said, and a fraction of the 12,000 in 2002.
China is so reticent on the issue that it has done nothing to publicise the long-term decline in its use of the death penalty. But it still executes more people than every other country put together, rights groups say.
The total for the rest of the world combined was 778 people in 2013, according to campaign group Amnesty International's annual report earlier this year. It does not give an estimate for Chinese executions.
Dui Hua said that it obtained its figures from "a judicial official with access to the number of executions carried out each year".
But the recent annual declines were "likely to be offset" this year, it said, due to factors including the "strike hard" campaign in the violence-wracked largely Muslim region of Xinjiang.
