China executes two criminals for child abduction

Beijing, Apr 27 (EFE).- Two men were executed by the Chinese authorities in the southern Guangdong province on Thursday for kidnapping children and selling them off.

The Intermediate Court in Guangzhou sentenced Zhang Weiping and Zhou Rongping to death in December 2018, and the decision was later ratified by the provincial High People’s Court, which rejected the appeals of the convicts, according to state-owned Xinhua agency.

Zhou was found guilty of kidnapping and selling a two-year old boy in Guangzhou province, while Zhang was convicted for kidnapping and selling at least eight children between 2003 to 2005.

The Intermediate Court claimed “legal rights” of the convicted criminals had been “fully protected” before the executions were carried out.

Although official data on the number of those sentenced to death in China remain classified, the nonprofit Amnesty International in its 2022 annual report called China as “the world’s leading executioner,” with thousands of death sentences carried out.

Human trafficking is a persistent problem in China, exacerbated by the one-child policy that was in force for decades before being revoked in 2016.

This policy, while checking population growth, resulted in a skewed sex ratio, with 42 million more men than women as of 2017. EFE

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