President Mahmoud Abbas asked his justice minister to annul court verdicts against dozens of Palestinians, including some convicted of collaborating with Israel, an aide said.

“I shall endeavour to be a guide for the future, to create a future for Africa,” President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal said on receiving the Abolitionist of the Year Award. The award was presented to President Wade by the President of the Italian Chamber of Representatives Pier Ferdinando Casini.

Gov. Rick Perry commuted the death sentences of 28 convicted killers. Perry ordered the commutations in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in March that the Constitution forbids executing anyone for a crime committed before the age of 18.

Mexico's House approved a measure striking the death penalty from the constitution and inserting language expressly prohibiting capital punishment.

Vietnam's justice ministry has proposed legislation introducing lethal injections as an alternative method of carrying out death sentences, a ministry official said.

a Philippine court sentenced to death seven suspected members of the al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf militant group for the kidnapping and murder of farmers on the southern island of Basilan in 2001.

the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) asked the National Palestinian Authority (Anp) to abolish the death penalty, and condemned the four executions which took place in Gaza on June 12.

two Iranians were hanged in public in Bandar-Abbas in southern Iran after they were found guilty of rape and armed robbery.

two Iranian men convicted of drug trafficking were hanged in a prison in the southern city of Kerman.

five men convicted of murder or armed robbery were hanged in Iran, one of them publicly in the southwestern city of Ahvaz and four others in a prison in the capital, officials said.

Iran's judiciary has ended proceedings against the country's top academic dissident, a man who faced the death penalty for telling Iranians not to follow their ruling clerics ''like monkeys'', his lawyer said.

Iran gave written assurances to the European Parliament that it would cease executing people found guilty of crimes committed before their eighteenth birthday.