China will execute 374 people during Olympics, Amnesty estimates

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Tuesday April 15 2008. It was last updated at 09:31 on April 15 2008.

Chinese police display a group of prisoners at a sentencing rally in the east Chinese city of Wenzhou. Eleven prisoners were later executed. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

An estimated 374 people will be executed in China during this summer's Olympic games in Beijing, Amnesty International has claimed.

A new league table of the world's most frequent executioners showed China officially used capital punishment 470 times last year. But some campaigners believe the true figure may be 8,000.

The human rights group called on Olympic athletes and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to press for greater openness about executions by the host country.

Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen said: "As the world's biggest executioner, China gets the 'gold medal' for global executions.

"According to reliable estimates, on average China secretly executes around 22 prisoners every day - that's 374 people during the Olympic games.

"Everyone involved in this year's Olympics, especially the IOC, should be pressing China to reveal the extent of its use of the death penalty, to reduce the 60-plus crimes for which it can be imposed and to move toward abolition."

Chinese criminal law professor Liu Renwen estimated that 8,000 executions took place during 2006 in China, which hosts the 29th Olympiad from August 8 to 24. The US-based Dui Hua foundation estimated that 7,500 to 8,000 executions took place in the same year.

Nearly 70 crimes can carry the death penalty in China, including tax fraud, stealing VAT receipts, damaging electric power facilities, selling counterfeit medicine, embezzlement, accepting bribes and drugs offences.

In total, today's league table showed there were 1,250 people executed worldwide last year, down from 1,591 over the previous 12 months.

There was a large rise in the number of executions in Iran - at least 317 people, up from 177 - and Saudi Arabia, where the total rose from 39 to at least 143.

Cases in Iran included the stoning to death of a man for adultery, and the execution of three teenagers who were aged between 13 and 16 at the time of their arrests.

In Saudi Arabia, a child offender aged 15 or 16 at the time of his detention was among those executed, and a man was beheaded for "sorcery" and adultery.

Last year Albania, Rwanda and the Cook Islands abolished the death penalty, bringing the total number of countries to have done so to 135.

Executions in the United States, usually among the world's most frequent users of the death penalty, dropped to 42 in 2007, the lowest