Turkey ratifies Protocol No. 13 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, concerning the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances.

Courts in China's southern province of Guangdong will introduce harsher penalties, including death, to deter motorcycle-riding purse snatchers who sometimes chop off the hands of victims who resist, the Yangcheng Evening News said.

two men convicted of hacking to death a family of three, including a 4-year-old boy, were sentenced to death and executed in China’s Yunnan Province.

the Surabaya Military Court, Indonesia, sentenced to death Navy Colonel M. Irfan Djumroni for murdering his former wife and a religious court judge in a frenzied attack after he lost a court case.

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.