Nations end colonialera capital punishment laws

Lawmakers in Sierra Leone voted unanimously Friday to abolish the death penalty, a momentous step that made the West African country the 23rd on the continent to prohibit capital punishment.

The decision was one more step in a longsought goal of civil society organizations and legal practitioners who see the death penalty as a vestige of Africa’s oppressive colonial history.

“This is a horrible punishment, and we need to get rid of it,” said Oluwatosin Popoola, a legal adviser at the rights group Amnesty International, a leading critic of capital punishment.

A vast majority of the 193 member states of the United Nations have either abolished the death penalty or do not practice it.

The vote in Sierra Leone came against the backdrop of a steady march in Africa to discard brutal laws imposed by past colonial masters. In April, Malawi ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. In May 2020, Chad did the same.

Nearly half of Africa’s 54 independent countries have abolished the punishment, more than double the number from less than two decades ago.

While death sentences and executions have declined globally in recent years, they do not necessarily reflect the growing number of countries that have banned capital punishment. At least some of the declines are attributable to the COVID19 pandemic, which slowed or delayed judicial proceedings in many countries. And in some, like the United States, executions were ramped up in 2020.

As in previous years, China led the 2020 list of countries that execute the most people, killing thousands, according to Amnesty International, which compiles capital punishment statistics. The exact figures for China are not known, as its data remains a state secret.

Next in 2020 came Iran, which executed at least 246 people, and then Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and in sixth place the United States, with 17 executions. Most of the American executions were of federal prisoners in the last six months of former President Donald Trump’s term, a turnaround after years of an informal moratorium.