Catherine West – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Catherine West on 2015-10-26.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what estimate his Department has made of the number of executions in China in 2015.

Mr Hugo Swire

The UK is against the use of the death penalty in all circumstances and we are committed to encouraging its global abolition. We welcomed China’s recent reduction in the number of crimes punishable by death from 55 to 46, but recognise that China is still believed to carry out the most executions with numbers estimated in the low thousands annually.

We continue to raise the issue with the Chinese authorities, and did so in detail during the last round of the UK-China Human Rights Dialogue in Beijing in April.