Extrajudicial execution and extrajudicial punishment are terms to describe death sentences and other types of punishment, respectively, executed without prior proper judicial procedure.

A minority of member nations of the United Nations still include the death penalty as part of their legal system, and this number continues to decrease. However, in order to minimise the chance of public criticism of a decision to kill someone, some governments use their security forces to kill people without going through any legal procedure, generally in a secretive way. Such a killing is termed an extrajudicial execution.

When insufficient information exists to distinguish whether someone has been killed by a government or rather is being secretly held in prison, the person is considered to have disappeared.

Extrajudicial punishment in Soviet Union

See NKVD troika and Special Council of the NKVD for examples from the history of the Soviet Union, where extrajudicial punishment "by administrative means" was part of the state policy.

Monitoring organizations

• Amnesty International
• Human Rights Watch

See also

• Lynching
• Terrorism
• School of the Americas (criticized for teaching techniques of extrajudicial executions and torture)