This article was originally published in The Washington Post, 26 July 2023.
Lawmakers in Ghana voted to remove the death penalty from the country’s criminal laws this week, hailing the move as a victory for the West African nation.
The Washington Post: Ghana votes to remove the death penalty, calling it sign of ‘inhumane’ society
- DPP in the Media
- 26 Jul 2023
A majority of Ghana’s parliament voted Tuesday to pass a bill to amend the Criminal Offenses Act, substituting the punishment — generally implemented by hanging or firing squad — for life imprisonment in crimes such as murder and piracy.
“Today the parliament of Ghana has made the country proud,” the deputy majority leader of parliament, Alexander Kwamina Afenyo-Markin, told the state-owned Ghana News Agency after the bill passed.
“The death penalty is no more a punishment in our statutes books,” he added, noting that the decision put Ghana in line with the “international human rights position.”
Some 170 nations have abolished or introduced a moratorium on the death penalty so far, according to the United Nations, but it remains legal in over 50 countries, including the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Ghana is the 29th African nation to abolish the punishment, following in the footsteps of Chad, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea and Zambia, among others.
The private members bill was introduced by lawmaker Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu, who represents the Madina constituency, a suburb of the capital, Accra, in the country’s south. He told Reuters that the parliament’s decision was in line with opinion polls in the country.
“On death row, prisoners woke up thinking this could be their last day on earth. They were like the living dead: psychologically, they had ceased to be humans,” he said in a separate statement.
“Abolishing the death penalty shows that we are determined as a society not to be inhumane, uncivil, closed, retrogressive and dark … and reflects our common belief that the sanctity of life is inviolable,” he said the statement.
Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, who has publicly expressed support for abolishing the death penalty, will need to sign the law before it formally comes into effect.
Human rights group Amnesty International hailed the vote as a “landmark” decision.
“Today’s parliamentary vote is a major step by Ghana towards the abolition of the death penalty,” Samira Daoud, Amnesty’s West and Central Africa director, said in a statement. “It is also a victory for all those who have tirelessly campaigned to consign this cruel punishment to history and strengthen the protection of the right to life.”
However, Daoud noted that Ghana’s constitution still allows for the death penalty in cases of high treason, and called for the constitution to be revised as well.
The Death Penalty Project, a U.K.-based nonprofit, said it had worked closely with Ghanaian lawmakers and interest groups to ban the penalty for all ordinary crimes. It also worked on a similar campaign in Sierra Leone in 2021.
“Today’s vote for abolition is historic and places Ghana squarely within the worldwide trend,” Saul Lehrfreund, its co-executive director, said.
As of Monday, Ghana had 172 men and six women on death row, according to its national prisons service, among its total prison population of just over 15,000. However, no executions have been carried out in the country since 1993.
Last year, Amnesty recorded 883 executions in 20 countries, a more than 50 percent increase from the year before, it said. The figure did not include China, where more than 1,000 executions are thought to have occurred. The group said it had recorded at least 576 in Iran, followed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States, where 18 executions occurred in 2022.
In the United States, the number of executions, death sentences and public support for capital punishment continued a decade-long decline last year, according to a 2022 report from the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks data on capital punishment. However, botched executions remain a concern, with 35 percent of all executions improperly carried out by personnel, the report said.
