Despite a long-term decline in the number of countries practicing capital punishment, publicly disclosed executions jumped nearly 15 percent in 2013 compared with a year earlier, largely because of “virtual killing sprees” carried out by the authorities in Iran and Iraq, Amnesty International said in its annual report on death-penalty trends.

The report, to be formally released on Thursday, said the number of publicly disclosed executions last year totaled 778, compared with 682 in 2012. The data excludes capital punishment in China, which regards information about the number of executions as a state secret.

Amnesty International, the London-based rights group that considers the abolition of the death penalty a top priority, considers China to be the world’s top executioner, killing more defendants than all other countries combined, but adds that reliable data is impossible to obtain.

In a statement released before the 2013 report’s publication, Amnesty’s secretary general, Salil Shetty, attributed the increase in the publicly disclosed number of capital punishments to “alarming levels of executions in an isolated group of countries,” a reference that focused on Iran and Iraq. “The virtual killing sprees we saw in countries like Iran and Iraq were shameful,” Mr. Shetty said. “But those states who cling to the death penalty are on the wrong side of history and are, in fact, growing more and more isolated.”

Excluding China, the Amnesty report said, the other top state executioners in 2013 were Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

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Source: The New York Times, March 26, 2014