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According to Amnesty International, a London based human rights organization that strongly opposes the death penalty, executions are up by nearly half worldwide in 2015.
Officially, at least 1,634 people were put to death last year, with just 3 countries accounting for about 90% of these killings.
But only a few countries reliably report their executions. The US for example, makes court records and execution statistics public. Authoritarian regimes like North Korea, Russia, and China, on the other-hand, closely guard these numbers.
The list below represents Amnesty's best efforts to report state-sponsored executions all around the world.