Electric chair (Florida Department of Corrections)

Death penalties by country

In 93 countries, there is a death penalty imposed by law. Of these, 8 countries apply the death penalty only to particularly serious crimes such as, war crimes. It has also been discontinued in 28 countries for at least 10 years - although there can still be penalties with pending executions.

In 2019 alone, 3300 people were sentenced to death and at least 1671 were actually executed. In addition, there is a larger number of unreported cases from individual countries, which cannot be estimated due to government restrictions.

Death penalties by country in 2019

Execution of the death penalty by country

no death penalty

only on serious crimes

death penatly abolished in practice

death penalty imposed and enforced

The following table contains the countries where a death penalty was legally possible in 2019. All data are provided by Amnesty International, where only registered and evaluated cases have been listed.

Country	Status	Executions	Death sentences
Afghanistan	active	0	14
Algeria	abolished in practice	0	4
Antigua and Barbuda	active	0	0
Bahamas	active	0	0
Bahrain	active	3	4
Bangladesh	active	2	220
Barbados	active	0	0
Belarus	active	2	3
Belize	active	0	0
Botswana	active	1	4
Brazil	only for serious crimes	0	0
Brunei	abolished in practice	0	0
Burkina Faso	only for serious crimes	0	0
Burma	abolished in practice	0	4
Cameroon	abolished in practice	0	0
Central African Republic	abolished in practice	0	0
Chad	active	0	0
Chile	only for serious crimes	0	0
China*	active	1,000+	1,000+
Comoros	active	0	0
Cuba	active	0	0
Democratic Republic of the Congo	active	0	8
Dominica (2016)	active	0	0
Egypt	active	32	435
El Salvador	only for serious crimes	0	0
Equatorial Guinea	active	0	0
Eritrea	abolished in practice	0	0
Eswatini	abolished in practice	0	0
Ethiopia	active	0	0
Gambia	active	0	1
Ghana	abolished in practice	0	8
Grenada	abolished in practice	0	0
Guatemala	only for serious crimes	0	0
Guyana	active	0	2
India	active	0	102
Indonesia	active	0	80
Iran	active	251	unknown
Iraq	active	100+	87
Israel	only for serious crimes	0	0
Jamaica	active	0	0
Japan	active	3	2
Jordan	active	0	8
Kazakhstan	only for serious crimes	0	0
Kenya	abolished in practice	0	29
Kuwait	active	0	5
Laos	abolished in practice	0	0
Lebanon	active	0	23
Lesotho	active	0	0
Liberia	abolished in practice	0	0
Libya	active	0	0
Malawi	abolished in practice	0	8
Malaysia	active	0	26
Maldives	abolished in practice	0	2
Mali	abolished in practice	0	4
Mauritania	abolished in practice	0	8
Morocco	abolished in practice	0	7
Niger	abolished in practice	0	8
Nigeria	active	0	54
North Korea	active	unknown	unknown
Oman	active	0	7
Pakistan	active	14	632
Palestine	active	0	4
Papua New Guinea	abolished in practice	0	0
Peru	only for serious crimes	0	0
Puerto Rico	active	22	35
Qatar	active	0	2
Russia	abolished in practice	0	0
Saint Kitts and Nevis	active	0	0
Saint Lucia	active	0	0
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	active	0	0
Saudi Arabia	active	184	5
Sierra Leone	abolished in practice	0	21
Singapore	active	4	12
Somalia	active	12	24
South Korea	abolished in practice	0	1
South Sudan	active	11	4
Sri Lanka	abolished in practice	0	34
Sudan	active	1	31
Syria	active	unknown	unknown
Taiwan	active	0	2
Tajikistan	abolished in practice	0	0
Tanzania	abolished in practice	0	4
Thailand	active	0	16
Tonga	abolished in practice	0	0
Trinidad and Tobago	active	0	8
Tunisia	abolished in practice	0	39
Uganda	active	0	2
United Arab Emirates	active	0	18
United States	active	22	35
Vietnam	active	unknown	76
Yemen	active	7	55
Zambia	abolished in practice	0	101
Zimbabwe	active	0	6

* Note on China
The data for China correspond to those of Anmesty International, but at the same time it is pointed out that these are only of a symbolic nature. Due to the secrecy of the actual case figures, it is not possible to give correct values. Amnesty International and other human rights organisations speak of several thousand executions per year.

Death penalty in the United States

The legal situation varies among the individual states. The death penalty has been formally abolished in 22 of the 50 states, as well as in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. In other states, it is still imposed but no longer carried out. Independent of state legislatures, federal courts can still impose a death sentence in cases of federal crimes.

Through the media, the electric chair is probably the best-known method of execution in the US. In fact, it has been used only 163 times since 1979. With over 1300 cases, injection of a poison is considerably more common. The state with significantly the most executions in the past 40 years is Texas. It is followed by Virginia, Oklahoma and Florida.

Types of executions

Executions always depend on the laws of the country in question. The most common species since the turn of the millennium:

Electric chair (mainly in the USA)
Decapitation (mainly in Saudi Arabia)
Hanging (mainly Muslim countries, as well as Japan and Singapore)
Shooting (USA, China, North Korea, Somalia, Vietnam, etc.)
Stoning to death (due to the Islamic Sharia in Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia)
Lethal injection or gas chamber (China, USA, Thailand, etc.)