THE world is gradually moving away from capital punishment. At the end of 2014, 98 countries had abolished the death penalty, compared with 59 countries in 1995. The number of countries carrying out executions has halved. Last year at least 607 people were executed in 22 countries, 22% fewer than in 2013, according to Amnesty International, a human-rights organisation. In America, one of only two rich countries alongside Japan to practice the death penalty, fewer executions were carried out in 2014 than in recent years. Yet the true global picture is unknown because thousands of people are believed to be executed in China each year, where official figures are considered a state secret. International law requires that capital punishment be reserved for the "most serious" crimes, such as murder. This is routinely ignored. In China alone there are 55 capital crimes, including economic crimes such as corruption (which account for 15% of executions, reckons Amnesty) and drug offences (8%). The war on drugs is enthusiastically waged in many countries. Half of all executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia are for such crimes. Indonesia has reinstated the death penalty for a raft of drug crimes, declaring a “national emergency”. It had not executed anyone in 2014; six people were put to death in January this year.

The prosecution of terrorism is also expanding. In Iraq, nearly all executions were for terrorism. In addition to Cameroon and the United Arab Emirates, which extended capital punishment to terrorist-related offences, Pakistan reversed a moratorium on the death penalty for civilians in December of 2014, following the Peshawar school massacre. Though initially applied solely to terrorist charges, the sentence was expanded to include all charges and 8,200 death row prisoners, or half the global total, on March 10th. Since the moratorium was lifted, 64 people have been executed in Pakistan—more than in Iraq during the whole of 2014.