“The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment,” said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International. “The good news is that executions are only carried out by a small number of countries, which shows that we are moving closer to a death-penalty free world.”

The figure for China, activists admit, is a bit of guess work. The Chinese government does not provide public information on the number of executions it carries out. Yet activists seem unanimous in the belief that Amnesty’s official number is too low.

Harry Wu, a leading international expert on Chinese labor camps, torture and repression, survived 19 years in the Laogai (Laogai means ‘labor camp’ in Chinese), before escaping to the United States. In 1992, Wu founded the Laogai Research Foundation.

“The truth is,” Wu explains, “nobody really knows how many people are executed every year in China. We have classified documents that state that as many as 24,000 people were killed in an eleven month period between 1983 and 1984 during the government’s ‘strike hard’ campaign. But the number could be as high as 8,000 a year now.”

Another reason why observers believe the number of executions in China is higher than the Amnesty report indicates is that up to sixty different crimes – murder, political corruption, racketeering, even tax evasion – are punishable by death in China. The main methods for carrying out an execution are by firing squad and lethal injection, which was introduced in 1997. But the technology for meting out death continues to improve.

Innovative executions

China is not only the world leader when it comes to the death penalty, but it is innovative in how it delivers death to prisoners.

A fleet of 40 ‘death buses’ now roam the country administering lethal injections to prisoners on death row. The mobile death chamber facilitates swift justice in towns and villages with authorities claiming the initiative is a strong deterrent against crime.

“We began to sell execution vans five or six years ago, and since then Chengdu, Kunming, Guiyang, Hangzhou, Xi’an and Chongqing local courts have all used our execution vehicles to carry out the death penalty,” said Mr. Zhang, from the marketing department of Jinguan Auto, the Chongquing based manufacturer of the death buses.

In carrying out the execution, the condemned individual is tied hand and foot to a stretcher, and a cocktail of lethal toxins is slowly injected into the body. A video monitoring system captures the entire process to ensure the execution complies with state rules and that medical staff are present.

The emergence of this more swift and economical way of meting out the death sentence to convicted men and women has naturally horrified activists.

“This is a cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” said Si-Si Liu of Amnesty Hong Kong. “The use of lethal injection does not mitigate the cruelty of the punishment and the involvement of medical professionals in executions runs counter to international medical ethics.”

Organ harvesting

The presence of medical staff adds another dimension of paranoia to these traveling death chambers in the form of excessive organ harvesting by Chinese officials. The swift and sterile executions make it easier for medical attendants to retrieve use organs from prisoners for transplants.

Mr Wu believes that not only is this practice rife, but it has become something of an indicator as to how many people are actually executed each year in the communist country.

“In 2007, a Chinese government medical journal proudly announced that China had become the second biggest country in the world (after America) for organ transplants,” Wu said. “The medical community admitted that the majority of the organs are taken from executed prisoners, and China performed 13,000 organ transplants that year. So you can make an approximate guess from that number how many executions were carried out.”

The Chinese government claims that the organs are used with the consent of the prisoners, however that’s something the Wu refutes.

“China does not have a donor system. Chinese custom dictates that the body must be kept whole even after death,” he says.

To explore the matter more fully, Wu travelled to China in 1994 under the guise of an American who was trying to find an organ for his sick brother. He was quoted a figure of $30,000 dollars – to be paid in cash only – and was told the organ would be provided. Wu says the hospital he visited was full of people looking for the same service.

However, how much of that business is funded through taking organs from dead prisoners is still unknown.

The speed and frequency that China resorts to using the death sentence has a two-fold horror. First, use of the death sentence alone is the most extreme human rights violation. China is killing more people – many who may be innocent of their suspected crimes – than the rest of the world combined, while devising newer and faster ways to carry out the death penalty.

Second, to think that these executions are helping to fortify an organ harvesting business, and could even drive the demand for capital punishment forward, is a nightmarish scenario.

As Amnesty’s Irene Khan says: “Capital punishment is not just an act but a legalised process of physical and psychological terror that culminates in people being killed by the state. It must be brought to an end.”

The Amnesty report does carry a silver lining: only 25 out of the 59 countries that retain the death penalty are reported to have used the measure in 2008 (In the US, where capital punishment remains legal, 37 inmates were executed, 5 less than the previous year, according to the US Bureau of Justice). Hopefully, Amnesty International’s grim international assessment will draw attention to this issue and spark some international interest that could eventually phase out this institutionalized form of death.

Ciaran Walsh for RT