Watchdog

BAKU -- Azerbaijan has suspended the operations of a university set up to promote democratic values.

Azad Fikir University (Free Thought University) representatives told RFE/RL that officials from the Prosecutor-General's Office showed up unexpectedly on April 10 and sealed its offices in Baku without giving any explanation.

The prosecutor-general's spokesman told the BBC that the reasons behind the closure will be clarified following a preliminary investigation.

AFU officials announced via Facebook that all lectures have been postponed.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Morningstar told AFU representatives he was disappointed at the university's closure. He also expressed concerns over the situation faced by Azerbaijani youth movements and organizations in general.

The AFU project was launched in 2009 by the OL! (BE!) youth movement. Its stated mission is to educate Azerbaijanis about democratic values through interactive lectures and roundtable discussions.

The institution has been supported by the U.S. and British embassies in Baku, USAID, and other international organizations.

The death penalty is dying. A slow death, to be sure, according to Amnesty International, but the use of capital punishment is waning worldwide, nonetheless.

In its annual review, the New York-based human rights watchdog finds that at least 682 executions were carried out in 21 countries around the world in 2012 -- two more than in 2011 -- but that “progress towards its abolition was seen in all regions of the world.”

A big caveat, however, is that Amnesty’s totals do not include the thousands of executions carried out in China, which is secretive about its executions and which is believed to put more people to death each year than the rest of the world put together.

Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, says executions are becoming “a thing of the past”:


The top five executing countries in the world in 2012 were China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, the latter being the only country in the Americas to practice the death penalty.

Methods of execution included hanging, beheading, firing squad, and lethal injection.

WATCH: Amnesty summarizes the findings of its new report


Amnesty says those executed were punished for a range of crimes that included nonviolent drug and economic offenses, as well as apostasy, blasphemy, and adultery -- “acts that should not be considered crimes at all.”

The report said 2012 saw the resumption of executions in India, Japan, and Pakistan and an “alarming escalation” in executions in Iraq, where 129 people were put to death, almost twice as many as in 2011 (68). Iran acknowledged 314 executions, but Amnesty says the real number is likely much higher.

Belarus continued to be the only country in Europe and Central Asia to carry out executions, with at least three instances reported in 2012.

Afghanistan is also singled out for the use of the death penalty in cases where "confessions" were extracted through the use of torture. Fourteen people were put to death in Afghanistan in 2012.

With these sobering statistics in mind, why does Amnesty maintain that the use of the death penalty is on the wane?

It notes that while 1,722 new death sentences were imposed in 58 countries around the world in 2012, that's down when compared with 2011, when 1,923 death sentences were imposed in 63 countries.

And while 21 countries practiced the death penalty in 2012, 28 countries used the death penalty a decade earlier, in 2003. It also notes that Latvia became the 97th country to abolish the death penalty (compared with 80 nations a decade before), while Connecticut became the 17th U.S. state to eliminate capital punishment. Benin and Mongolia ratified a UN treaty aimed at abolishing the death penalty, while a majority of states supported a UN resolution calling for a moratorium on executions. Amnesty says that 140 nations have done away with the death penalty in law or in practice.

In its report, Amnesty cites a major U.S. study that finds that the deterrence argument should not be used to justify capital punishment. As Shetty says:

Amnesty opposes the death penalty in all cases, saying it “violates the right to life and is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment.”

The full Amnesty report can be found here.

-- Grant Podelco