Amnesty International has launched its most recent report on Death sentences and executions in 2014. In their annual report they publish the minimum figures of recorded death sentences and executions that they are able to verify. For producing a Worldmapper-style cartogram, absolute numbers are essential of course, which requires some decisions to be made which numbers go into the map transformation. For the following two maps, showing the death penalty executions and sentences in 2014, the minimum figures of validated cases provided in the report were used, or, where these were not stated, the estimated figures as stated in the report were used instead (China was set to 1000 to not dominate the cartogram entirely, even if the number is believed to be much higher than that). The maps therefore need to be seen as a general picture of the state of death penalty in the world, rather than the exact reality. As stated by Amnesty, “the real number of people executed is much higher. There are no figures for China, for example, which is believed to execute more people than the rest of the world put together. Other countries like Belarus also execute prisoners in secret, often without informing the detainees’ relatives or lawyers.”
Tag Archives: human rights
Violence against Women in the European Union
Everyone has a responsibility to prevent and end violence against women and girls, starting by challenging the culture of discrimination that allows it to continue.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Today’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women raises awareness for an issue which on the campaign’s website is described as a global pandemic because of the discrimination against women and persisting inequalities between men and women: “35% of women and girls globally experience some form of physical and or sexual violence in their lifetime with up to seven in ten women facing this abuse in some countries. It is estimated that up to 30 million girls under the age of 15 remain at risk from FGM/C, and more than 130 million girls and women have undergone the procedure worldwide. Worldwide, more than 700 million women alive today were married as children, 250 million of whom were married before the age of 15. Girls who marry before the age of 18 are less likely to complete their education and more likely to experience domestic violence and complications in childbirth.”
These problems are a global phenomenon. In a recent report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights it was concluded that “an estimated 13 million women in the EU were victims of physical violence during the 12 months before the survey” and “an estimated 1.5 million women in the EU were raped in the course of those 12 months.”
The following maps show some of the key data of the study in form of cartograms that use the number of adult women as a basemap, meaning that each country of the European Union is resized according to the total number of woman aged 15 and above to which the overlaid statistics relate in the survey. The maps show the real extent of violence against women in the EU. The first map summarises the data, while the second map series below splits the results from the study into violence within and outside relationships:
Walking Dead: Capital Punishment
Amnesty International has recently released their latest report on executions and sentences around the world during 2010 (pdf) stating that ” it is clear that countries using the death penalty are now increasingly isolated” (see also here, the underlying data has also been added to the Guardian Datastore).
The following two maps show a worldmapper-style view of the state of death penalty using figures from the time of 2007 to 2010 out of the above mentioned sources. There are two pictures that can be drawn from the data: The first map shows the countries of the world resized according to the total death penalty sentences recorded there in that time period (the map inset shows the state of death penalty around the world on a conventional map). The second map visualises the actually executed death penalties from 2007-2010 by resizing the countries accordingly (the map inset here shows a world population cartogram that allows a comparison of the main map with the actual population distribution).
In both maps the figures for China are uncertain and estimated to be in the thousands. China has been set to 1000 in both maps and may thus appear much smaller than it actually is related to this topic.
The two maps with their very distorted shape of the world show how divided the world is in this topic. Very few countries dominate the map while the majority of countries disappear completely. Europe and South America are literally eradicated, and when looking at the actually executed death penalties in the second map, even more countries vanish:
