Capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence (law), sentence ordering that an offender b ...

in Myanmar is a legal penalty. Myanmar is classified as a " retentionist" state. Before 25 July 2022, Myanmar was considered "abolitionist in practice," meaning a country has not executed anyone in the past ten years or more and is believed to have an established practice or policy against carrying out executions. Between 1988 and 2022, no legal executions were carried out in the country. In July 2022, four democracy activists, including Zayar Thaw and Kyaw Min Yu, were executed. There have been at least 25,000

extrajudicial killings An extrajudicial killing (also known as an extrajudicial execution or an extralegal killing) is the deliberate killing of a person without the lawful authority granted by a judicial proceeding. It typically refers to government authorities, ...

since the start of the

Rohingya genocide The Rohingya genocide is a series of ongoing persecutions and killings of the Islam in Myanmar, Muslim Rohingya people by the Tatmadaw (armed forces of Myanmar). The genocide has consisted of two phases to date: the first was a military crackd ...

on 9 October 2016. Also, two ''de facto'' autonomous states,

Wa State Wa State is a '' de facto'' independent state and self-governing region in Myanmar that has its own political system, administrative divisions and army.29 December 2004佤帮双雄, Phoenix TV. While the Wa State government recognises Myanm ...

and Mong La, are reported to carry out executions. Myanmar abstained from voting regarding the 2020

United Nations moratorium on the death penalty At Italy's instigation, a resolution for a moratorium on the death penalty was presented by the European Union in partnership with eight co-author member States to the General Assembly of the United Nations, calling for general suspension (no ...

. There were at least 86 new death sentences in Myanmar in 2021. This was a significant increase on previous years;

Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says that it has more than ten million members a ...

has attributed this to the

2021 Myanmar coup d'état A coup d'état in Myanmar began on the morning of 1 February 2021, when Elections in Myanmar, democratically elected members of the country's ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), were deposed by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar's milita ...

, and the subsequent martial law since February of that year. Myanmar is one of only three countries believed to have people on death row for crimes committed as juveniles as of 24 May 2022; Myanmar is believed to have at least two juveniles on death row, along with 80 in

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

, and five in the Maldives. Myanmar also sentenced people to death ''in absentia'' in 2021, as well as sentenced people to death in trials considered unfair, according to Amnesty International.

References

Myanmar Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has ...

Law of Myanmar {{Human-rights-stub, state=expanded