the latest edition of “Death Row Usa”, a quarterly report by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization for ethnic minorities in the united States, shows an 8% decline in the country's death row population during the past 5 years, down from 3,652 in 2000 to 3,373 on January 1, 2006.

Saddam Hussein admitted in court that he gave orders that led to the execution of Shi'ite Muslims in the 1980s, but justified the punishment as his right as Iraq's president.

Iran executed three Arab activists in the south-western oil city of Ahwaz, according to local dissidents reached by telephone.

two men convicted of carrying out a deadly a bomb attack in Iran's restive oil city of Ahwaz were executed in public early morning.

a judge has ruled that a former prison guard convicted of killing 13 people in a 1982 shooting rampage can't be executed because he is mentally ill.

a court in Bangladesh sentenced 21 people to death in connection with a wave of coordinated bombings on August 17, 2005.

the Quang Ninh provincial first instance court, Vietnam, sentenced to death Xom Phon, a 30-year-old Laotian, for trafficking over 70 cakes of heroin and 4,000 tablets of Methamphetamine from Lao to northern Quang Ninh province late in 2005.

Abed Abdulrazzak Kamel, convicted of killing three US Christian missionaries in southern Yemen in 2002, was executed by firing squad. Kamel shot dead a surgeon and two of her colleagues at a Baptist mission hospital in the town of Jibla.

an Afghan court sentenced former spy chief Assadullah Sarwari to death for killing hundreds of people during communist rule, the first such punishment for war crimes after decades of conflict in the country.

the number of executions in China is a state secret, but Liu Renwen, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said he agreed with estimates in academic circles that the figure was likely to be about 8,000 a year.

all death penalty appeals must be heard in an open court from the latter half of this year to better protect human rights, China's chief justice Xiao Yang announced.

a young man from the town of Ardebil, north-western Iran, was hanged in prison.