Sierra Leone: the National Assembly votes the abolition of the death penalty

Published on : 07/24/2021 – 08:54

The Sierra Leone National Assembly voted on Friday July 23 to abolish the death penalty, an AFP journalist noted. The death penalty will now be replaced by life imprisonment or a minimum of 30 years.

This former British colony in West Africa has been criticized by human rights activists for not having officially abolished the death penalty, although the last executions there date back more than twenty years and that sentences are generally commuted to life imprisonment.

President Julius Maada Bio has yet to enact the text.

In May, Deputy Justice Minister Umaru Napoleon Koroma announced that the government would abolish the death penalty to “uphold the basic human rights of Sierra Leoneans.”

The Sierra Leonean Constitution of 1991 provides for the death penalty for aggravated theft, murder, treason and mutiny.

During a heated debate Friday between the 146 members of the National Assembly, the leader of the parliamentary majority, Mathew Nyumah, called on his colleagues to vote for the abolition of the death penalty, according to an AFP journalist.

“Please understand that we are making this sacrifice to comply with international best practices” for the country, he said during the meeting.

Some 144 abolitionist countries around the world

This vote comes as the death penalty is increasingly rare in Africa. Malawi abolished it in April and Chad last year.

In Sierra Leone, the last executions took place in 1998, when 24 army officers were put to death after an attempted coup a year earlier.

According to Amnesty International, at the end of 2020, there were 144 countries that were abolitionist in law or de facto, that is to say that had not carried out executions in the past ten years. That is almost three quarters of the States in the world.

Despite a soil teeming with diamonds, Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its economy, plagued by corruption, was devastated by an atrocious civil war (1991-2002) which left some 120,000 dead.

A truth and reconciliation commission set up to investigate the brutal conflict had recommended in the 2000s the abolition of the death penalty, likening it to “an affront to civilization”.

But Sierra Leonean leaders opposed it. The courts sentenced 84 people to the death penalty between 2016 and 2020, according to the UN.

With AFP