African countries and the death penalty; An analysis of post-colonial Africa's use of capital punishment (original) (raw)

The Decline of the Mandatory Death Penalty in Africa: A Comparative Constitutional Analysis

22 Indiana International and Comparative Law Review 267, 2012

This piece is designed to be a practitioner-friendly comparative article looking at each of the three major decisions of African supreme courts striking down the death penalty for murder (Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi), as well as summarizing the earlier jurisprudence in the United States, South Asia, and the Commonwealth Caribbean. This litigation, which has succeeded in removing some of the most arbitrary aspects of capital punishment in the developing world, has instilled international human rights norms in domestic constitutional jurisprudence.

Capital punishment in precolonial Africa: the authenticity challenge

Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 2018

The modern debate over death penalty abolition in Sub-Saharan Africa frequently references the precolonial period. Has the death penalty truly existed since time immemorial, or is it largely a European imposition? The extent to which precolonial societies used capital punishment is difficult to discern, as many of the anthropological and legal sources that document this period were influenced by colonialism. These sources nonetheless show that the use of capital punishment in the precolonial period was tied to notions of political authority and the spirit world, though legal procedures and even methods of execution varied enormously among societies. This article considers the reliability problems of the extant sources and attempts to make tentative conclusions as to the existence of the death penalty prior to the onset of European rule, bearing in mind that these conclusions are not exhaustive or even necessarily representative of the continent's diversity.

Transitional processes and the death penalty in North Africa

2013

Brief summary of the book: The increase in the number of countries that have abolished the death penalty since the end of the Second World War shows a steady trend towards worldwide abolition of capital punishment. This book focuses on the political and legal issues raised by the death penalty in "countries in transition", understood as countries that have transitioned or are transitioning from conflict to peace, or from authoritarianism to democracy. In such countries, the politics that surround retaining or abolishing the death penalty are embedded in complex state-building processes.

KILLING THE CONDEMNED: THE PRACTICE AND PROCESS OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN BRITISH AFRICA, 1900–1950s

The Journal of African History, 2008

ABSTRACTCapital punishment in British colonial Africa was not just a method of crime control or individual punishment, but an integral aspect of colonial networks of power and violence. The treatment of condemned criminals and the rituals of execution which brought their lives to an end illustrate the tensions within colonialism surrounding the relationship between these states and their subjects, and with their metropolitan overlords. The state may have had the legal right to kill its subjects, but this right and the manner in which it was enacted were contested. This article explores the interactions between various actors in this penal ‘theatre of death’, looking at the motivations behind changing uses of the death penalty, the treatment of the condemned convicts whilst they awaited death, and the performance of a hanging itself to show how British colonial governments in Africa attempted to create and manage the deaths of their condemned subjects.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT TRENDS: A CASE OF UGANDA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM

Journal of Global Justice and Public Policy, 2022

This Article analyzes some theories that have shaped various countries’ penal policies while focusing specifically on the developments in the United Kingdom and Uganda, two neo-liberal countries that share some common history, although culturally different. Despite several authoritarian regimes around the globe that have been implicated in gross human rights abuses, there is a decline in capital punishment globally. The highest rate of incarceration is found in neo-liberal societies, where capitalism and individualism flourish. However, it is also in these societies that relentless campaigns by religious and human rights organizations and world bodies like the United Nations have resulted in the reduction of the death penalty in particular and penal reform in general.