Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

In its work on monitoring the use of the death penalty, the ODIHR aims to increase transparency as well as compliance with international safeguards, while also facilitating exchange of information about the abolition of the death penalty.

Transparency means that information on the identity of individuals sentenced to death or executed should be made public. In addition, statistics and information on the incidence of death sentences and executions should periodically be made available to the public.

As a forum for participating States to make such information available, the ODIHR produces an annual publication entitled The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area, which is released at the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting. It is intended to provide a comparative overview of the use of the death penalty throughout the OSCE region based upon information provided by the participating States themselves.

Despite this effort, some of the participating States that retain the death penalty remain reluctant to make statistics on death sentences and executions freely available. A number of OSCE participating States continue to treat information on the death penalty as a state secret, a practice that clearly contradicts their OSCE commitments.