LAST year appears to have seen a record 12 months for executions in China, after the authorities carried out a massive crackdown against criminals in the final days of December.
Local newspapers in Beijing yesterday indicated that at least 48 people were either executed or sentenced to death between December 27th and 29th alone, taking the figure for the last two months of the year to more than 200. In more than half of those cases, execution was carried out, the reports said.
The first eight months of 1995 saw a 13.2 per cent rise in serious crime cases, the Public Security Minister, Mr Tao Siju, said recently.
To combat the trend, the traditional spate of executions ahead of the national October 1st holiday, carried on through autumn into December.
Television coverage of trials was also intensified in the final weeksof the year, with frequent broadcasts of trials showing defendants being sentenced to death in packed courtrooms.
According to the Lodon based human rights organisation, Amnesty International, available statistics show an increasingly systematic use of capital punishment as part of China's law and order crackdown.
"Amnesty International is concerned about many aspects of the use of the death penalty in China, including the lack of safeguards to avoid miscarriages of justice," it said in its latest report.
Amnesty, updating its estimates, said there had been 1,865 officially reported death sentences and 1,313 executions in the first six months of 1995, against 2,783 sentences and 2,050 executions for all of 1994.
That figure was already a sharp rise from 1,419 executions in 1993.
But given the lack of transparency in China's judicial system and the inaccuracy of official statistics, Amnesty said the figures were probably "far below the actual number."
Other observers, however, have noted that the Chinese press was likely to have accurately reported the rise in the number of executions, given the high priority accorded propaganda for the government's anti-crime drive.
On December 29th, Haikou Intermediate Court in the southern island of Hainan sentenced 22 robbers and murderers to death. Three of the sentences were suspended, the Hainan daily said.
It was not known if the death sentences had been carried out but often the execution, with a bullet in the back of the neck, is carried out swiftly after the trial.