Japan on Thursday executed two death-row inmates in Osaka and Hiroshima, as the first death sentences carried out in 2017.
Death penalty has triggered a swift rebuke from rights activists since November 2016.
The Justice Ministry identified the two as Masakatsu Nishikawa, 61, and Koichi Sumida, 34.
Japan is expected to come under unprecedented domestic pressure over its use of death penalty when the country’s legal community calls for its abolishing by August.
The country’s Federation of Bar Associations, whose membership includes 37,000 lawyers and hundreds of other legal professionals, said it would declare its opposition to capital punishment at a meeting in early October due to growing concern over miscarriages of justice.
Nishikawa was sentenced to death for killing four female bar managers in western Japan in 1991 and his death sentence was finalised by the Supreme Court in 2005.
Sumida was convicted of raping and murdering a colleague in the city of Okayama in 2011 and his death sentence was finalised in 2013.
“I ordered the executions after careful consideration,” Justice Minister Katsutoshi Kaneda told a news conference.
“It was the second execution since he took the post in August.
“Both cases were “extremely cruel, the precious lives of the victims were taken for selfish purposes,” Kaneda said.
The deaths brought the total number of executions carried out under the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to 19.
The Amnesty International Japan also condemned the Thursday’s executions.
It urged the Japanese government “to officially introduce a moratorium on executions and immediately launch a nationwide discussion as a first step toward the abolition of capital punishment.”
Japan and the U.S. are among the few industrialised counties that still impose death sentences.
In 2016, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations issued a declaration urging the government to abolish capital punishment and introduce life sentences without parole by 2020, when the country hosts the UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.
(dpa/NAN)