Top photo caption: A lethal injection chamber at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington, September 6, 2024. The number of executions around the globe in 2025 surged to the highest recorded figure in 44 years, according to a new Amnesty International report released May 17, 2026. OSV News photo/Matt Mills McKnight, Reuters
By Kate Scanlon, OSV News
WASHINGTON OSV News — The number of executions around the globe in 2025 surged to the highest recorded figure in 44 years, a new Amnesty International report said.
The May 17 report, titled “Death Sentences and Executions 2025,” comes soon after a recent video message from Pope Leo XIV marking 15 years since the abolition of the death penalty in his home state of Illinois, and shortly after the U.S. Department of Justice said in court filings it would seek the death penalty for the man charged with the fatal shootings of two people outside a May 21, 2025, event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington.
Amnesty International recorded executions of 2,707 people across 17 countries in 2025, the highest number recorded by the group since 1981. However, the group cautioned that its tally does not include what it believes to be thousands of executions carried out in China, adding that the country therefore remained the world’s top executioner.
“This alarming spike in the use of the death penalty is due to a small, isolated group of countries willing to carry out executions at all costs, despite the continued global trend towards abolition,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement. “From China, Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia to Yemen, Kuwait, Singapore and the USA, this shameless minority are weaponizing the death penalty to instill fear, crush dissent and show the strength state institutions have over disadvantaged people and marginalized communities.”
Excluding China, the report estimated that Iranian authorities, the main drivers behind the spike, executed at least 2,159 people, more than double their 2024 figure. Saudi Arabia carried out at least 356 executions; Kuwait and Singapore carried out 17 each; Egypt carried out 23. The U.S., meanwhile, carried out 47. According to the report, 46% of all known executions worldwide were attributed to drug-related offenses.
“It’s time for executing countries to step into line with the rest of the world and leave this abhorrent practice in the past,” Callamard said. “The death penalty does not make us safer. Rather, it is an irreversible affront against humanity that’s driven by fear, with utter disregard for international human rights law.”
Based in London, Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights.
In his April video message, Pope Leo said, “The Catholic Church has consistently taught that each human life, from the moment of conception until natural death, is sacred and deserves to be protected.”
“Indeed, the right to life is the very foundation of every other human right,” he said.
“For this reason,” he continued, “only when a society safeguards the sanctity of human life will it flourish and prosper.”
The Catholic Church’s official magisterium opposes the use of capital punishment, considering it inconsistent with the inherent sanctity of human life, and advocates for the practice’s abolition worldwide.
The late Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 to clarify the Church’s teaching that capital punishment is morally “inadmissible” in the modern world and that the Church works with determination for its abolishment worldwide.
In his 2020 encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis addressed the moral problem of capital punishment by citing St. John Paul II, writing that his predecessor “stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice.”
Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X @kgscanlon.
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