PARIS: The use of the death penalty is declining -- more than two-thirds of countries have abolished or ceased to use it and executions continued to decrease in 2017, Amnesty International says.
But capital punishment remains in place in 23 countries, with China still believed to be the "world's top executioner", the group's 2017 report says.
Amnesty International says that at the end of last year, 142 countries -- more than two-thirds -- had abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, with 106 ending it in law for all crimes.
The latest were Guinea and Mongolia, which in 2017 abolished capital punishment for all crimes, while Guatemala outlawed it for civil crimes only.
Sub-Saharan Africa made significant progress towards abolition with a big reduction in the number of death sentences throughout the region.
Only Somalia and South Sudan carried out executions in 2017 compared with five countries in the region in 2016.
Burkina Faso, Chad, Kenya and The Gambia, meanwhile, took measures to end the use of capital punishment by adopting new legislation or introducing bills.
In Europe and central Asia, Belarus was the only country to have carried out the death sentence in 2017, with at least two executions down from at least four the previous year, Amnesty says.
Kazakhstan, Russia and Tajikistan maintained moratoriums.
There were 993 executions recorded in 2017 in 23 countries, a decrease of 4% from 2016 and 39% from 2015, which was a peak year with 1,634 executions.
Amnesty's numbers do not include the "thousands" it says are believed to have been executed in China, which classifies this information as a state secret.
Excluding China, Amnesty says Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan -- in that order -- carried out 84% of all executions in 2017. Compared to the previous year, the figures were down by 31% in Pakistan and 11% in Iran.
In Iran, at least 31 executions were in public.
Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates took up executions again in 2017.
Conversely, Amnesty recorded no executions in five countries that had applied the death penalty in 2016: Botswana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Sudan and Taiwan, though the latter did execute one man in August 2018.
For the ninth consecutive year the United States was the only country on the American continent to execute prisoners, with 23 recorded.
The United States and Japan, where there were four executions in 2017, were the only countries in the G8 group leading economies to carry out executions.
Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago meanwhile handed out death penalties.
Countries carrying out the penalty last year used methods ranging from decapitation to hanging, firing squad and lethal injection, Amnesty says.
Thailand keeps the death penalty but for eight years did not execute anyone until a few months ago. On June 18 this year, a 26-year-old man was put to death by lethal injection for aggravated murder in the country’s first execution since August 2009, which followed a period of no executions since 2003.
Figures provided by Thailand's Ministry of Justice in March 2018 state that 510 people, including 94 women, were on death row of whom 193 had exhausted all final appeals. Almost half of these 193 are believed to have been sentenced for drug-related offences.