Capital Punishment Around the World

While we're on the topic of law and order and international norms, here's a map from the Criminal Justice blog at change.org on capital punishment policies around the world.



According to the blog entry by Matt Kelley, the top five countries for executions in 2007 were China (470 executions), Iran (317), Saudi Arabia (143), Pakistan (135), and the United States (42). (Kelley notes that China likely underreported executions.)

There are some clear geographical patterns here. Basically, capital punishment has been completely delegitimized in Europe, and to a slightly lesser extent in Latin America. It is still fairly healthy, if that is the word for it, in most of the Muslim world and East Asia, however.

And then there is the United States. This is one of those issues where the US really stands out as culturally and socially distinct from other Western countries. No other European country (save for the dictatorial regime in Belarus), nor any other Anglophone country, practices capital punishment. In this case, the US has more in common with the traditionalist societies of the Middle East and Asia, which tend to have a more authoritarian character at the societal level.