The number of people executed last year across the world - at least 3,797 - was the highest since 1996, and the second highest in 25 years. But the figure could be far greater, since no one knows how many executions take place in China. The figure of around 3,400 is used by Amnesty International, but the real number could be as high as 10,000, writes Kevin Myers.
The US executed 59 people and Vietnam 64, but otherwise executions are largely an Islamic phenomenon. The biggest single state-killer after China was Iran, with 159 executions. Singapore and Belarus were the only non-Muslim countries in the next 10 states which judicially killed prisoners. Saudi Arabia executed 33 people, Pakistan 15, Kuwait nine, and so on, down to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with four each. The rest of the world executed 18 people, just over half the figure that dear old Saudi Arabia managed.
It is a universal piety in this country that the death penalty is wrong. This belief is, bizarrely, held by Sinn Féin, which reserves the right of its armed wing to kill whomever it likes, but denies the State the same right. No, I cannot explain it either. It just is. But illogic is a powerful characteristic of human conduct, and we are extraordinarily poor at acknowledging moral inconsistency.
We know, for example, that if we banned the private motor car, we would save hundreds of lives a year. This is a certainty, and there is no gainsaying it. Yet as a people - and like other people all round the world - we have decided that our freedom to drive is more important than the lives of the hundreds of victims we know will die as a consequence of our exercising that freedom. That we do not know the identity of the victims in advance is hardly a virtue; that they are chosen by the random vagaries of mischance, mishap and misfortune does not excuse what we do, but merely guarantees the innocence of the victims.
So: we condemn societies for killing people which, by due process of law they have found guilty of knowingly committing capital offences - yet we stay largely silent about our own tolerance of homicide, which, China aside, in this country alone exceeds the numbers of people executed around the world every year. So where is the basis for our moral superiority over, for example, the Americans? At least the 159 people they executed had been found guilty of something or other - which cannot be said of the 500 or so people who will probably die on our roads this year.
It's not the same thing, you declare, and rightly so. The Americans execute their criminals as a matter of conscience. Does conscience play a part at all in our deciding road policy? And is it not instead simply a matter of expediency? And is that a true measure of how we respect life - that is merely a matter of what is expedient or convenient? One of the arguments against capital punishment is that sometimes the wrong person is killed. But the present state of our traffic laws mean that the wrong people are always killed, so we can hardly argue moral superiority on those grounds. Indeed, we forfeit any right to have a concern for innocence after having embraced half-hearted security measures against the IRA, so enabling a terrorist war to continue for 25 years, during which the lives of thousands of people were lost.
Indeed, within our diseased jurisprudential scale of values, the lives and the liberty of republican terrorists became more precious than those of the people whom they would kill. Our Supreme Court actually ruled that republican terrorists would be immune to extradition if they killed using a handgun while pursuing the Constitutional objective of a united Ireland. Oh, very moral indeed.
So, will the Iraqis be morally wrong if they execute Saddam Hussein? Were the allies morally wrong to execute the Nazis who were hanged after Nuremberg and other war-crimes trials? Were the Israelis morally wrong to execute Eichmann? Would it have been morally wrong for the allies to have executed Hitler if they had captured him alive? If you say no to any of the above questions, if you acknowledge the rights of a state to execute anyone, then you have accepted the principle of judicial killing and what remains are merely the circumstances in which it may occur.
Who really feels it would be right for Saddam Hussein, whose wars and whose terror regime cost some two million lives, to live out his natural life in jail, and pay no other punishment for his crimes? That would be to declare that the suffering which he caused to all those victims' families - at least 10 million people - was of little account.
There is little or no evidence that death sentences deter, and there is every evidence that innocent people are executed where the death penalty remains. So like most people, I deplore the death penalty - but I cannot say that it is wrong at all times and in all circumstances.
Treason in time of war surely deserves the death penalty as the only measure which recognises the gravity of the offence; so too does genocide. Who can seriously maintain that there is a moral justification for sending Ratko Mladic merely to jail for life? For surely, the only gift which he has to offer in exchange for the thousands of Muslims he had butchered is his life; and for civilisation not to extract that small price from him is to offer the final indignity to his victims.