Manama: Kuwait has rejected criticism of its decision to go ahead with the execution of seven convicts, insisting that all legal avenues had been exhausted.

Human Rights Watch said that hanging seven people by Kuwait was part of a worrying regional rise in use of the death penalty.

However, Kuwait dismissed the criticism and said that the "carrying out of the death sentences against the seven individuals convicted of murder was according to the provisions of the Kuwaiti Penal Code."

"The death penalty verdicts pronounced by the courts were in cases of premeditated murders and the punishment was carried out after exhausting all levels of litigation," Ghanim Al Ghanim, assistant foreign minister for legal affairs, said in a statement carried by Kuwait News Agency (Kuna) on Friday.

"The verdicts were based on indisputable evidence the convicts committed the crimes as charged. The evidence included testimonies from witnesses and confessions by the accused of committing the grave crimes."

Al Ghanim said the verdicts were pronounced following fair and public trials "in which all the guarantees stipulated by the Kuwaiti law were provided and lawyers assumed the task of defending their clients."

"The verdicts were upheld by the Cassation Court, the country's highest court, and became res judicata that could not be challenged. By carrying out the court verdicts, Kuwait did not violate any of the covenants it had ratified, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Arab Charter for Human Rights, or international norms or the GCC Declaration of Human Rights," Al Ghanim said.

The Kuwaiti official said that his country's national laws provided multiple safeguards in the case of the death penalty.

"This is very clear in the fact that such verdicts are pronounced by a high independent and neutral judiciary in public trials where the accused are defended by their lawyers," he said.

Kuwait on Wednesday executed seven individuals, four men and three women, in the Central Prison.

The convicts, two Kuwaitis (Shaikh Faisal Al Abdullah Al Sabah and Nasra Al Enezi), two Egyptians, a Bangladeshi, a Filipina, and an Ethiopian, were found guilty in cases of premediated murder, rape or theft and were hanged in application of the verdicts pronounced by lower courts and upheld by the Court of Appeals and the Court of Cassation and endorsed by the Emir.