Zimbabwe scraps the death penalty, but Kenya is still undecided

Efforts to amend the death penalty are underway through the Penal Code (Amendment) Bill, which seeks to delete the sections on death sentence, and replace them with life imprisonment. [iStockphoto]

Zimbabwe hasn’t executed anyone who was sentenced to death since 2005. With the passing of the Death Penalty Abolition Act 2024 on December 31, Zimbabwe has become the 127th country in the world to end death penalty.

This process began with the introduction to Parliament of an opposition private member’s Bill led by Edwin Mushoriwa, though some amendments were made by the government.

Other countries, too, have been moving away from the death penalty. In Africa, only seven of the 55 states in the African Union are “actively retentionist”, meaning that they sentence people to death and have carried out executions in the last decade. These states include Egypt, Somalia and South Sudan.

Twenty-six African countries have abolished the death penalty in law. The most recent countries to do so include Ghana, the Central African Republic and Zambia. Another 14 within the African Union have moratoriums on executions.

Some governments that retain the death penalty, such as Kenya, claim that they can’t abolish it while there is considerable public support for capital punishment. Until now, this had been true in Zimbabwe, too.

Over a decade ago, Zimbabwe’s then minister of justice, now president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, expressed his commitment to abolition, condemning the death penalty as an “odious and obnoxious provision”. But a change in policy was not forthcoming because some Zimbabwean politicians claimed in discussions with rights organisations that the public was committed to retention.

The Death Penalty Project has done research in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean that has shown repeatedly that such perceptions – about public opinion being strongly in favour of retention of a death penalty – are false.

In 2017, we conducted a survey of 1,200 Zimbabweans for data on public attitudes to the death penalty. We found that most people knew and cared little about capital punishment. While 61 per cent said they supported the death penalty, most said they would accept abolition if it were government policy.

In 2019, we carried out in-depth interviews with 42 Zimbabwean opinion leaders. They included politicians, legal practitioners and religious, civil society and media leaders. An overwhelming majority (90 per cent) were in support of abolition.

There remain many legitimate concerns about Zimbabwe’s criminal justice system and wider abuses of human rights, which will not be fixed by abolition. Nevertheless, Zimbabweans should feel proud to have joined the global majority that has consigned the death penalty to the past.

In so doing, Zimbabweans have discarded a punishment that breaches the human rights of all those subject to it; that risks the execution of innocent people; that has a disproportionate impact on the poor and uneducated; and that doesn’t reduce violent crime any more than a long prison sentence would.

When asked what policies were likely to be most effective at reducing violent crimes, only 8% referred to executions. Most respondents favoured better moral education of young people and reducing poverty – social policy rather than criminal justice responses.

Hoyle is Director of the University of Oxford Death Penalty Research Unit, Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. Jabbar is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director, Death Penalty Project. This article was first published in The Conversation