In 2016, four convicts were executed in Belarus, the only country on the European continent still practicing the death penalty. After a year and a half pause during negotiations on EU sanctions, lifted in February 2016, executions resumed and by the end of the year reached the highest number since 2008.

Belarus conducts regular killing of people on the basis of unfair trials, where self-incrimination is often used by the prosecution as the main evidence of guilt, and in an atmosphere of total secrecy. The whole process is ...