Countries That Still Use the Death Penalty (2025 Ranked)

Capital punishment — the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for a crime — remains legal in 55 countries and is actively carried out in approximately 20. The global trend is unmistakably toward abolition: in 1990, the majority of countries retained the death penalty; by 2025, a clear majority have abolished it in law or practice. But the countries that still use it include the world's most populous nations. Amnesty International recorded 1,518 known executions globally in 2024 — the highest figure since 2015 — carried out by just 15 countries. The global aggregate is rising even as the number of executing countries falls.

Amnesty International publishes the most comprehensive annual death penalty statistics. Chinese execution numbers are classified as state secrets; Amnesty uses conservative minimum estimates.

Source: Amnesty International — Death Sentences and Executions 2024 Global Report

How Capital Punishment Is Counted — and Why the Numbers Vary

Understanding any death penalty ranking requires understanding what is and is not being measured.

Known executions are confirmed executions reported through official government sources, court records, media, or verified witness accounts. They are a minimum figure. Countries with opaque judicial systems — China most significantly, but also North Korea, Vietnam, and others — carry out executions that are never publicly recorded.

Death sentences are convictions resulting in a death sentence, which may or may not eventually be carried out. Some countries have hundreds on death row with no executions in years.

Abolitionist in practice means a country retains the death penalty in law but has not carried out an execution for at least 10 years and has a policy not to do so.

Legally abolished means the death penalty has been removed from the criminal code entirely — for all ordinary crimes, or in some cases for all crimes including war crimes.

Amnesty International explicitly excludes China from its global execution totals in its headline figures because the actual number is unknown. When Amnesty reports "1,518 known executions" in 2024, China's thousands of executions are not included in that count.

Why these countries lead in executions

The world's top executing countries reflect distinct patterns rather than a single trend. China's dominance (estimated 1,000+ annually) is enabled by judicial secrecy and the breadth of capital crimes in Chinese law, including corruption offences that Western systems treat as civil matters. Iran's 972 executions in 2024 represent a sharp spike driven by the judiciary's reversal of drug-sentencing reforms — executions for drug trafficking alone now account for over 40% of global capital punishment. Saudi Arabia is executing at record rates (345+) partly due to the application of mandatory death sentences for drug trafficking to migrant workers in ways that Western observers view as disproportionate. The United States, often portrayed as exceptionally punitive, now executes fewer people annually than any of the top five executing countries, and its rate has been declining for decades. Russia, Nigeria, and other executing countries do not appear in the top global rankings despite retaining capital punishment, because their absolute execution numbers remain below 100 per year. The global pattern is concentration: executions are increasingly concentrated in fewer countries, predominantly in Asia and the Middle East.

Countries by Executions (2024)

Amnesty International data, 2024.

Rank	Country	Executions (2024 est.)	Method	Primary offences
1	China	1,000+ (est., state secret)	Lethal injection	Murder, drug trafficking, corruption
2	Iran	972+	Hanging	Murder, drug trafficking, moharebeh
3	Saudi Arabia	345+	Beheading	Murder, drug trafficking, terrorism
4	Iraq	63+	Hanging	Murder, terrorism
5	Yemen	38+	Various	Murder, terrorism
6	United States	25	Lethal injection	Murder only
7	Vietnam	30+ (est.)	Lethal injection	Drug trafficking
8	Singapore	5–10 (est.)	Hanging	Drug trafficking
9	Japan	3	Hanging	Murder only
10	Pakistan	5+	Hanging	Murder
11	Bangladesh	3+	Hanging	Murder
12	Egypt	20+	Hanging	Murder, terrorism
—	EU countries	0	—	Abolished
—	United Kingdom	0	—	Abolished 1969
—	Australia	0	—	Abolished 1967
—	South Korea	0	—	Moratorium since 1997

Sources: Amnesty International Annual Report 2024; Death Penalty Information Center; US execution counts from Death Penalty Information Center state-by-state data.

Source: Death Penalty Information Center — Execution Database

Where this data comes from

The execution statistics and country rankings in this article are drawn from Amnesty International's annual Death Sentences and Executions reports, which remains the most comprehensive global compilation of capital punishment data available to international researchers. Amnesty combines official government sources, court records, media reports, and verified witness accounts to produce its annual counts. The 2024 figures represent the most recent comprehensive global dataset. Amnesty explicitly excludes China from its global totals because Chinese execution statistics remain classified state secrets — the Amnesty estimates for China (1,000+) are conservative minimum figures based on regional court data and testimony from former officials. All other figures represent confirmed executions. This data collection approach means that the true global figure is higher than the reported 1,518 known executions in 2024.

China: The World's Leading Executioner

China's death penalty operates almost entirely beyond independent observation. The government classifies execution statistics as state secrets — a policy that has been in place for decades and shows no sign of changing.

The scale of the unknown. Amnesty International estimates China executes at least 1,000 people per year; independent researchers drawing on court statistics, regional data leaks, and former official testimony suggest the true figure may be 2,000 to 8,000 annually. To calibrate the scale: in 2024, all countries outside China combined carried out approximately 1,518 known executions. China's actual execution total almost certainly exceeds this figure by a substantial margin.

The offences. Chinese criminal law applies the death penalty to over 40 crimes, including murder, rape, robbery, drug trafficking, corruption, espionage, bribery, and serious economic crimes. Capital punishment for corruption has been used prominently within Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign — several senior officials convicted of bribery and embezzlement have received death sentences, sometimes commuted to "death with reprieve" (a two-year suspended sentence that typically results in commutation to life imprisonment if the condemned does not reoffend).

Execution method. China shifted from shooting to lethal injection as its primary execution method in the 2000s, using mobile execution vans in some regions — a development that raised concerns about transparency and organ harvesting from executed prisoners. Chinese authorities have denied systematic organ harvesting; independent researchers and human rights organizations have documented evidence that it occurred, particularly with prisoners of conscience. A 2019 tribunal (the China Tribunal) concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place at a significant scale.

Reforms. China has narrowed its application of the death penalty since the 2000s: removing it from several economic crimes (tax offences, fraud), requiring Supreme People's Court review of all death sentences (implemented 2007), and restricting execution of pregnant women, juveniles, and those over 75. The trend is toward selective reduction, not abolition. Capital punishment retains strong public support in China according to available polling data.

Source: Amnesty International — China Death Penalty 2024 Briefing

Q: Why does China keep execution statistics secret? A: The classification of execution data as a state secret reflects the government's broader approach to information that could be used to criticize the criminal justice system. Transparency would allow international human rights organizations to document patterns — including any disproportionate application to ethnic minorities, political dissidents, or religious groups — and would give ammunition to diplomatic pressure for reform.

Iran: The Drug Execution Surge

Iran recorded at least 972 executions in 2024 — the highest figure recorded by Amnesty International since 2015, and a substantial increase from the 853 recorded in 2023.

The drug offence reversal. The single most significant driver of Iran's 2024 increase was executions for drug trafficking. In 2017, the Iranian parliament amended its drug trafficking laws to reduce mandatory death sentences — a reform welcomed by international human rights bodies, which resulted in hundreds of death sentences being commuted. Beginning in 2022, Iran's hardline judiciary, backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, effectively reversed this reform. Executions for drug offences rose sharply in 2023 and continued at elevated rates in 2024. Drug trafficking accounted for approximately 637 of the 1,518 known global executions in 2024 — over 42% of the total.

Political executions. Iran executes individuals under moharebeh ("enmity against God") and ifsad fil-arz ("corruption on earth") charges — categories that have been applied to political opposition members, protesters, LGBTQ individuals, and people accused of apostasy. Several individuals connected to the 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests were executed under these charges.

Public hangings. Iran continues to conduct public executions, sometimes in crowded squares, sometimes broadcast on state television. This is explicitly framed as deterrence and political signaling. The regularity of public executions has been documented by international human rights monitors including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Juvenile offenders. Iran has executed people for offences they committed as minors, in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Iran has ratified. International pressure has reduced but not eliminated this practice. Several individuals spent years on death row after childhood convictions; some were executed after appeals failed.

Source: Amnesty International — Iran Death Penalty Report 2024

Saudi Arabia: Record Executions and the Drug Surge

Saudi Arabia executed at least 345 people in 2024 — a figure that represents a dramatic escalation from historical norms. The country recorded 196 executions in 2022 (its previous record) and has been executing at significantly higher rates since then.

Drug trafficking as a capital offence. A substantial share of Saudi executions are for drug trafficking offences. Saudi Arabia applies mandatory death sentences for trafficking amounts above certain thresholds; the practice is applied to both Saudi citizens and foreign nationals, including many migrant workers from South Asian and African countries. Human rights organizations have documented cases where individuals were executed for drug offences involving amounts that would not constitute serious criminal offences in other jurisdictions.

Method. Saudi Arabia executes by beheading — typically with a sword, performed in public. This practice is rooted in the country's application of Islamic criminal law (hudud punishments), and the public nature is explicitly intended as deterrence. Crucifixion — display of the executed body on a cross in a public space — is used in some cases following beheading, though this is less common.

Foreign nationals. A disproportionate share of those executed in Saudi Arabia are foreign nationals — primarily migrant workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other labor-sending countries. Human rights organizations have documented cases where foreign nationals were executed after trials conducted in Arabic without adequate translation, with limited consular access, and following confessions obtained through coercion.

Q: Is the death penalty applied fairly in Saudi Arabia? A: Available evidence suggests it is not. Foreigners and migrant workers are over-represented in execution totals relative to their share of criminal offending; wealthy Saudi citizens convicted of serious crimes sometimes escape capital punishment through blood money payments (diya) — a formal Islamic legal mechanism that allows families of victims to accept compensation in lieu of execution; and the opaque judicial process limits independent evaluation of cases.

Source: Amnesty International — Saudi Arabia Death Penalty 2024

The United States: Geographic Decline

The United States is a significant outlier among wealthy democracies — the only member of the G7 and the OECD that regularly carries out executions. But the domestic reality is that capital punishment is becoming increasingly concentrated in fewer states and declining in total numbers.

State concentration. The United States carried out 25 executions in 2024. Only five states executed anyone: Texas (9), Florida (4), Oklahoma (4), Missouri (3), and one other state with a smaller total. 27 states have either legally abolished the death penalty or have active moratoriums. The geographic distribution reflects both political culture — capital punishment remains popular in the South and parts of the Plains states — and the legal ecosystem for capital defense, which has made death sentences increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain and carry out in states with active public defender systems.

The innocence problem. Since 1973, 190 death row prisoners have been exonerated — proven innocent after conviction, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. This is not a small number: 190 people would have been executed had the system not caught its errors in time. DNA evidence has been central to many exonerations. The impossibility of reversing a wrongful execution is the most powerful practical argument against capital punishment in American public discourse — and it has driven support for abolition among groups that otherwise support retributive justice philosophies.

Source: Death Penalty Information Center — Innocence and the Death Penalty

The lethal injection crisis. American states have faced a decade-long pharmaceutical supply crisis for execution drugs. Multiple manufacturers — including Pfizer, Lundbeck, and others — have refused to supply drugs for lethal injections, citing ethical concerns. States have turned to compounding pharmacies, untested three-drug protocols, and in some cases nitrogen hypoxia (Alabama conducted the first nitrogen hypoxia execution in January 2024, on Kenneth Smith). Several executions have been botched — prisoners taking longer than expected to die, showing visible signs of distress — generating legal challenges and contributing to declining execution rates.

The racial dimension. Peer-reviewed research has consistently documented racial disparities in death sentencing. The seminal Baldus study (1983) analyzed over 2,000 Georgia murder cases and found that defendants convicted of killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than those convicted of killing Black victims, after controlling for over 230 other variables. The Supreme Court acknowledged the study's validity in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) but found its statistical evidence insufficient to prove intentional discrimination in any specific case — a ruling that effectively made systemic racial bias in capital punishment unreviewable through the equal protection clause.

Source: Baldus, D.C., Woodworth, G., and Pulaski, C. Equal Justice and the Death Penalty. Northeastern University Press, 1990

Japan: Secrecy Until the End

Japan is unusual among developed democracies in retaining and regularly using the death penalty — typically executing 3 to 5 people per year. What makes Japan distinctive is its process.

Death row inmates in Japan are not informed of their execution date in advance. They learn of the scheduled execution, at most, hours before it is carried out — sometimes only minutes before. Legal teams and family members also receive minimal or no advance notice. This practice is internationally unique among retentionist countries and has been criticized by the UN Human Rights Committee as a violation of the right to humane treatment and meaningful access to counsel before execution.

Japan executes by hanging. Condemned prisoners are typically held in solitary confinement for years, sometimes decades. The prolonged uncertainty — not knowing whether the day's knock on the cell door is a routine check or the beginning of the execution process — has been characterized by human rights organizations as a form of psychological torture.

Source: UN Human Rights Committee — Japan Death Penalty Concerns, CCPR/C/JPN/CO/7

Japanese public opinion polls consistently show majority support for capital punishment — around 80% in recent surveys. This is one of the highest rates of public support among any developed country.

Singapore: Mandatory Minimums for Drugs

Singapore's death penalty is internationally distinctive for its mandatory nature. For drug trafficking above defined quantities — 500 grams of cannabis, 30 grams of heroin, 250 grams of methamphetamine — the law historically required a death sentence with no judicial discretion.

The reform. In 2012, Singapore amended its Misuse of Drugs Act to allow judges to impose life imprisonment instead of death in limited circumstances: when the Public Prosecutor certifies that a trafficking defendant has substantively cooperated with law enforcement, or when the defendant has only a courier role and suffers from an intellectual disability. These exceptions are narrow and discretionary, but they have resulted in several death sentences being commuted.

The deterrence argument. Singapore explicitly justifies its drug execution policy on deterrence grounds: the country's drug use rates are among the world's lowest, and the government attributes this partly to the severity of drug penalties. Critics note the causal relationship is not established — other factors including culture, education, and law enforcement intensity also explain low drug use rates, and Singapore's deterrence argument cannot be separated from these confounders.

The execution population. Most of those executed under Singapore's drug laws are couriers — small-scale transporters who carry drugs for more powerful traffickers, often in exchange for relatively modest payments. Trafficking kingpins who design the supply chains are typically more insulated from the legal system and are executed at lower rates than the couriers they employ. UN human rights bodies have consistently criticized Singapore's mandatory death penalty as disproportionate — specifically because it executes the most disposable participants in drug networks while traffickers at higher levels benefit from plea arrangements or escape jurisdiction.

Source: UN Human Rights Council — Universal Periodic Review, Singapore

The Global Abolition Trend

The long-run trend in death penalty policy is clear. In 1960, the death penalty was legal in the vast majority of the world's countries. By 2024, Amnesty International records:

• 112 countries have fully abolished the death penalty in law for all ordinary crimes.
• 9 countries have abolished it for ordinary crimes but retain it for war crimes or military offences.
• 23 countries are "abolitionist in practice" — retaining it in law but having not executed anyone in over 10 years with a policy not to do so.
• 55 countries retain and use the death penalty.

Africa has been a significant abolition leader in recent years. Zimbabwe abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes, and Zambia fully repealed the death penalty and ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR in 2024. This continues a trend of African nations moving toward abolition at a faster pace than other regions.

The most dramatic regional outlier is the United States — the only country in the Western Hemisphere that carries out executions (Cuba conducts executions rarely, but does retain the penalty). Every other democracy in North America, South America, and Western Europe has abolished capital punishment. A related ranking on another human-rights topic is countries with the most hate crimes.

Source: Amnesty International — Global Abolition of Death Penalty Statistics 2024

The Deterrence Question: What the Research Shows

One of the most politically charged claims about capital punishment is that it deters murder. The empirical evidence does not support this claim.

The National Research Council, in a comprehensive 2012 review of existing deterrence research, concluded that existing studies of the relationship between the death penalty and homicide rates were "fundamentally flawed" and should not be used to inform judgments about capital punishment's deterrent effect. The specific problems: studies could not adequately separate the effect of execution rates from the many other factors that affect homicide rates; the numbers of executions in US states are too small to produce statistically meaningful estimates; and the causal mechanisms required for deterrence — that potential murderers know the death penalty exists, correctly calculate their probability of receiving it, and alter their behavior accordingly — are implausible for most homicides, which are committed impulsively or under circumstances where the perpetrator is not rationally calculating consequences.

Cross-national comparisons do not support deterrence either. US states with the death penalty do not have lower murder rates than comparable states without it. Countries that abolished capital punishment have not experienced murder rate increases. Canada abolished capital punishment in 1976; its homicide rate subsequently declined.

Source: National Research Council. Deterrence and the Death Penalty. National Academies Press, 2012

The argument for capital punishment on deterrence grounds has essentially no credible empirical support. The arguments that do have logical force are retributive — the claim that some crimes deserve death as a matter of justice — and incapacitation (an executed person cannot commit further crimes). These are legitimate philosophical positions even in the absence of deterrence evidence, but they rest on moral and political arguments, not empirical ones.

The Wrongful Execution Problem

The 190 US death row exonerations since 1973 represent people who were convicted by juries, sentenced by judges, and in most cases spent years on death row — before evidence emerged establishing their innocence. The question this raises for capital punishment is not whether the system makes errors (it clearly does) but whether errors in a system that cannot be reversed are acceptable.

Wrongful conviction is not a random accident. It clusters around known factors: eyewitness misidentification (the leading cause of wrongful conviction in cases involving DNA exoneration), false confessions (especially from individuals with intellectual disabilities or juveniles in interrogation), prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense representation, and faulty forensic science (including bite mark evidence and hair microscopy, both now discredited as courtroom sciences).

Source: Innocence Project — Factors Contributing to Wrongful Convictions

These factors are not aberrations specific to capital cases — they are documented problems in the criminal justice system generally. Capital cases receive more intensive scrutiny, better legal representation (in most jurisdictions), and longer appellate processes than most felony cases. If the capital system still produces 190 exonerations in 50 years, the rate of wrongful conviction in less-scrutinized criminal cases is likely higher.

The 2014 execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma is typically cited in discussions of wrongful execution risk. Lockett's execution was botched — the lethal injection drug protocol failed, and Lockett died of a heart attack 43 minutes after the procedure began, in apparent distress. The event triggered a review of execution protocols and legal challenges that continue in multiple states. While Lockett was not exonerated (the Supreme Court denied his appeal), the execution illustrated the operational as well as moral difficulties of maintaining capital punishment in practice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is the death penalty an effective deterrent to murder? A: The peer-reviewed evidence does not support this claim. A 2012 National Research Council review concluded that existing deterrence studies were fundamentally flawed and should not inform policy. US states with the death penalty do not have lower murder rates than those without; countries that abolished it have not seen murder rate increases. The deterrence mechanism requires potential murderers to know the penalty exists, correctly calculate their execution probability, and alter their behavior — conditions that are implausible for most homicides.

Q: How many countries have abolished the death penalty? A: As of 2024, 112 countries have abolished it in law for all ordinary crimes. An additional 9 retain it only for wartime offences. 23 are "abolitionist in practice" — retaining it legally but not executing anyone for over 10 years. 55 countries retain and actively use capital punishment.

Q: What methods of execution are used globally? A: Hanging (most common globally, used in Iran, Iraq, Japan, Singapore, Pakistan, and others), lethal injection (United States, China, Vietnam, and others), beheading (Saudi Arabia), shooting (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Belarus, and others), electrocution (some US states, used rarely), and nitrogen hypoxia (Alabama, first used 2024). North Korea is documented as using public shooting and hanging; the scale of executions is unknown.

Q: Why does Japan still have the death penalty when most developed countries have abolished it? A: Japanese public opinion polls show approximately 80% support for capital punishment — one of the highest rates in any democratic country. Japan's political culture places significant weight on victim families' demands for retributive justice; the death penalty is framed as giving victims' families closure. The practice is not under serious legislative challenge, though critics within Japan and international bodies including the UN Human Rights Committee have called for abolition.

Q: How many people have been wrongly executed in the United States? A: No wrongful execution can be conclusively proven after the fact, since DNA evidence and other post-conviction review mechanisms require the defendant to still be alive to petition for testing. The Death Penalty Information Center lists several cases where strong evidence of innocence emerged after execution but before exoneration — Cameron Todd Willingham (Texas, 2004) is the most discussed. The 190 exonerations from death row since 1973 establish that the system convicts innocent people; whether it has executed any is a question of probability rather than confirmed fact.

Q: Are there international human rights treaties that prohibit the death penalty? A: The Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989, commits ratifying states to abolishing the death penalty. As of 2024, 90 countries have ratified it. The main retentionist countries — China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Japan, Singapore — have not ratified the protocol. The European Convention on Human Rights (Protocol 13) prohibits the death penalty for all Council of Europe member states under any circumstances.

The Takeaway

The global trajectory of capital punishment is toward abolition — the majority of the world's countries have ended it, and the number of executing countries is declining. But the countries that retain and use it most aggressively are populous, powerful, and show no near-term signs of change: China executes thousands in secret; Iran has reversed its drug execution reforms and executed nearly 1,000 people in 2024; Saudi Arabia is executing at record rates. The empirical arguments against capital punishment — wrongful execution is irreversible, deterrence evidence is absent, application is racially and socioeconomically skewed — have become stronger over time, not weaker. The political arguments for retention rest on retributive justice philosophies and cultural support for state punishment that is genuine and widespread in the countries that retain it. The gap between the empirical case against the death penalty and the political support for it is, in many countries, not narrowing. Understanding that gap requires taking seriously both the evidence and the cultural values it has failed to dislodge.

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