Azerbaijan, Baku / corr Trend D.Khatinoglu / Statistics on the execution of death penalties provided by Amnesty International over a year testifies for the abolishment of the death penalty. "The only way is to apply sanctions to countries with the death penalty," Mina Ahadi, an Iranian law-defender, the chairman of the Committee for Struggling Anti-Death Penalty Worldwide, said.
Annual statistics on death penalties of the international organization for human rights protection and the Amnesty International indicate their broad application in some world countries. The law-defenders urge that it is not so difficult to prevent them.
Statistics by Amnesty International are no exact, because relevant information is kept in secret by countries where the death penalty is in force, Ahadi told Trend in a telephone conversation from Berlin on 9 October.
"Amnesty International announced in its statistics that over a year 1,000 people were sentenced to death in China, whereas we have data which reveals the number to be 5,000. The document said that every year 300 people are executed in Iran, but this figure is considerably lower than this," The law-defender stressed. The world community realized the importance of the abolishment of death penalties and it is necessary to apply political, economic and diplomatic sanctions with respect to countries where the death penalty is still in force.
The law-defender condemned all types of execution of death penalties.
"According to Amnesty International, the number of minors sentenced to the death penalty reached 71. However, I have data which says that 250 teenagers, including 17 citizens of Afghanistan, were sentenced to the death penalty in Iranian prisons," Ahadi said. She was commenting on the execution of 18-year old teenagers in Iran.
On 10 October the world sees the Universal Day of Fighting the Death Penalty. The Committee for Fighting the Death Penalty jointly with the UN Commission on Human Rights will hold demonstrations in Stockholm, Toronto, Amper (Finland), Bremen (Germany), Cologne, Berlin, Oslo, and London.