Kamal Hossain Hawlader, a man convicted of killing his teenage wife with poison after he failed to extract dowry payments from her family, was hanged at a jail in southern Bangladesh.

the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) called on Botswana to end its enforcement of "inhuman and degrading" corporal and capital punishment.

a Burundi court sentenced four senior police officers to death for their involvement in the murder of the World Health Organisation (WHO) representative in the country in 2001.

Caribbean leaders inaugurated a court that would serve as the highest judicial body for much of the region, a step toward shedding their 170-year-old dependence on Britain's Privy Council that many had resented as a vestige of colonialism.

nine members of a gang were executed after a high court upheld the death sentences handed down to them during an earlier local trial in China's Henan province.

Sang Yuechun, a former Chinese legislator, was sentenced to death for rape, embezzling public funds, defrauding banks, possessing guns and leading criminal gangs, the government said.

Hai Ting and Cao Xiude, two Chinese men who were charged with murdering three Japanese tourists in Xi'an, capital city of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, were sentenced to death by the Xi'an Intermediate People's Court.

China will further refine the death penalty review process this year, Chief Justice Xiao Yang told the on-going annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature.

it was reported that the No. 1 and No. 3 Hospitals affiliated to the prestigious Sun Yat-sen University in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou was carrying out a lucrative trade in liver transplants using organs harvested from executed convicts.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao insisted his country had made progress on improving its human rights record and said Beijing was working towards ratifying a UN convention on the issue.

it was reported by the Yangcheng Evening News that a woman thought to have been murdered in the 1980s reappeared in China, 16 years after the man convicted of killing had been executed.

three convicted drug traffickers were sentenced to death in southwestern China's Sichuan province, while two accomplices were given long prison terms, the Chengdu Commercial Daily said.