Last year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared: “The death penalty has no place in the 21st century.”
But it appears that many leaders of the 53 Commonwealth countries—who will gather in Malta for their biennial meeting in November—didn’t get that memo.
Nine of these leaders head governments that regularly execute their own citizens. Twenty-six more hail from states that are abolitionist “in practice” but retain capital punishment in their legal code. The organization’s most-populous countries—India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh—have all hanged prisoners in the past three years.
