China says no plans to abolish death penalty
BEIJING, April 15 (Reuters) - China on Tuesday defended its use of the death penalty after Amnesty International said it was was the world's most prolific state executioner in 2007.
The human rights group said it had established that at least 470 people were executed -- equivalent to nine a week -- and a further 1,860, or 35 a week, were sentenced to death in China last year.
On a per capita basis, however, the Amnesty figures showed China trailed Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan in the number of executions carried out last year.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said China had no plans to scrap the death penalty. "The conditions are not right in China to abolish the death penalty, and would not be supported by the majority of the people," she told a news conference.
"But we severely control and cautiously use it to ensure that it is only used in a small minority of the most serious cases."
She did not provide details on how many people were executed in China last year.
China has been slowly reforming the death penalty system after several high-profile wrongful convictions raised public anger.
Last year the Supreme People's Court took back its power of final approval on death penalties, relinquished to provincial high courts in a crime-fighting campaign in the 1980s.
In total, at least 1,252 people were executed in 24 countries last year and 3,347 sentenced to death in 51 countries, Amnesty said, adding that some 27,500 people were now on death row globally.
It said Iran executed 317 people, Saudi Arabia 143, Pakistan 135 and the United States 42. Between them, these four countries plus China accounted for 88 percent of all known executions. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie)
