Governments Executed a Record Number of People Last Year. Here's Who.

The numbers arrived in mid-May with the kind of cold specificity that resists easy dismissal: 2,707 people were executed by governments around the world in 2025. A 78-percent spike over the year before. The highest toll recorded since 1981.

Amnesty International’s annual death penalty report mapped a world in which state-sanctioned killing is not a relic of a crueler era but an accelerating practice: driven, in most cases, by governments with little tolerance for scrutiny and even less for dissent.

So, what is going on?