THE year barely seems like it has begun and it’s already proving to be a deadly one.

While the fate of condemned Bali Nine duo Andrew Chan remains on hold, Indonesia has come under the spotlight over its ongoing use of the death penalty.

But this week another country attracted headlines when it announced 8000 prisoners on death row would soon be executed.

Pakistan has lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in all capital cases after restarting executions for terrorism offences in the wake of a Taliban school massacre.

The interior ministry has directed provincial governments to proceed with hangings for prisoners who have exhausted all avenues of appeal and clemency, a move which has been widely

condemned by human rights groups.

Pakistan has hanged 24 convicts since resuming executions in December after Taliban militants gunned down more than 150 people, most of them children, at a school in the restive northwest in December last year by Pakistani Taliban splinter group Tehreek-e-Taliban.

The partial lifting of the moratorium only applied to those convicted of terrorism offences, but officials said it has now been extended.

Authorities claim there are around 1000 condemned prisoners around the country whose appeals and clemency petitions have failed.

Until December’s resumption of executions, there had been no civilian hangings in Pakistan since 2008.

Only one person was executed in that time — a soldier convicted by a court martial and hanged in November 2012.

Human rights campaign group Amnesty International estimates that Pakistan has more than 8000 prisoners on death row, most of whom have exhausted the appeals process.

Meanwhile Human Rights Watch said the decision was a huge step backwards.

Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said the moratorium puts thousands of lives at risk.

“Government approval of a potential nationwide execution spree is a knee-jerk reaction to a terrible crime rather than a considered response to legitimate security concerns.”

Pakistan has one of the world’s largest populations of prisoners facing execution, and the country’s law mandates capital punishment for 28 offences, Human Rights Watch said.

These include murder, rape, treason, and blasphemy.

However, it said it was concerning that those on death row were often from the most marginalised sections of society, including Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death by the Lahore High Court on charges of blasphemy.

While human rights groups claim the death penalty breeches international law, supporters of the death penalty argue it’s is the only effective way to deal with the scourge of militancy.

In the latest case, an anti-terrorism court in Karachi on Monday issued death warrants for two men convicted of murder during a house robbery.

The two men, Mohammad Afzal and Mohammad Faisal, are due to be sent to the gallows on March 17.

The lifting of the moratorium could also pave the way for the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, a former police bodyguard who shot dead Punjab governor Salman Taseer in Islamabad in 2011.

On Monday a court in Islamabad upheld the death sentence passed on Qadri for the attack, which he said he carried out to punish Taseer for questioning the country’s strict blasphemy

laws.

But the judges also cancelled Qadri’s conviction terrorism charges, which before Tuesday’s announcement made it unlikely he would be hanged.

Meanwhile 44 people have already been put to death in Saudi Arabia in what Amnesty is calling an “unprecedented spike” in the death penalty.

It said the secretive Kingdom was well on track to far surpass its previous annual execution records after three more men were put to death on Wednesday, which is four more times the

number of people executed compared to the same time last year.

The men — a Saudi Arabian, a Yemeni and a Syrian national- were all executed for drug-related offences.

Said Boumedouha, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, said the “unprecedented spike in executions constitutes a chilling race to the bottom

for a country that is already among the most prolific executioners on the planet.”

“If this alarming execution rate continues, Saudi Arabia is well on track to surpass its previous records, putting it out of step with the vast majority of countries around the world

that have now rejected the death penalty in law or practice.”

According to Amnesty, Saudi Arabia has regularly been among the world’s top five executioners.

Saudi executed more than 2000 people between 1985 and 2013 alone, figures provided by the human rights group reveal.

Trials in capital cases are often held in secret and defendants are given no or insufficient access to lawyers.

Most executions are done by beheading and many take place in public and in some cases decapitated bodies are left lying on the ground in public squares as a “deterrent”.

While it may sound barbaric, the death penalty isn’t just limited to Asia and the Middle East.

The United States has also come under scrutiny in recent days following the news that Utah will bring back executions by firing squad.

The move is being seen as the most dramatic illustration yet of the nationwide frustration over bungled executions and shortages of lethal-injection drugs.

Utah and several other states are scrambling to modify their laws on the heels of a botched Oklahoma lethal injection last year, and one in Arizona in which a condemned man took nearly

two hours to die.

Convicted murderer Clayton Lockett’s execution involved the use of a new cocktail of drugs that included the sedative midazolam as the first in a three-drug combination.

Lockett died of a heart attack after a botched lethal injection saw him take 43 minutes to die in an Oklahoma person in April last year.

Meanwhile, Texas executed a Mexican mafia hit man on Wednesday evening with its second-to-last dosage of drugs.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert refused to confirm if he will sign the firing-squad bill, a decision that’s not expected for a week or so.

“States are wondering which way to go, and one way is to send up a warning flag that if you don’t allow us freedom in this lethal-injection area, we’ll do something else,” said Richard

Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

“This might be a message rather than a preferred route of punishment.”

States have struggled to keep up their drug inventories as European manufacturers opposed to capital punishment refuse to sell the components of lethal injections to US prisons.

The Texas deadline is the most imminent, but other states are struggling, too.

The Utah bill’s sponsor, Rep Paul Ray, said that a team of trained marksmen is faster and more humane than the drawn-out deaths involved when lethal injections go awry.

While Utah’s next execution is probably a few years away, Mr Ray said that he wants to settle on a backup method now so authorities are not racing to find a solution if the drug

shortage drags on.

However opponents said firing squads are a cruel holdover from another era and will earn the state international condemnation.

Politicians stopped offering inmates the choice of firing squad in 2004, saying the method attracted intense media interest and took attention away from victims.

Outside the US, 54 countries allow executions by gunshot, including China, Vietnam, Uganda and Afghanistan, according to Cornell University Law School’s Death Penalty Worldwide

project.

Of those, 41 countries allow full firing squads while the others do it differently, such as by a single bullet at close range. Fewer than half of those countries have done a firing squad execution in the last decade, the school’s research has found.

Utah is the only state in the past 40 years to carry out such a death sentence, with three executions by firing squad since the US.

The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The last was in 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was put to death by five police officers with .30-caliber Winchester rifles in an event that generated international interest and elicited

condemnation from many.

The American Civil Liberties Union decried Gardner’s execution as an example of the “barbaric, arbitrary and bankrupting practice of capital punishment.”

Religious leaders at the time called for an end to the death penalty at an interfaith vigil in Salt Lake City.

Three more death-row inmates who chose firing squad before the law changed would still have the option after their appeals are exhausted.

If those executions go forward, prison authorities will choose the gunmen from a pool of volunteer officers, starting with those in the area where the crime happened, Mr Ray said.

“We’ve always had a lot more volunteers than actually had spots.”.