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.
A majority of Ghana’s parliament voted on 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 was passed.
“The death penalty is no more a punishment in our statutes books,” he added, noting that the decision puts Ghana in line with the “international human rights position.”
“Ghana is upholding the constitutional and fundamental human right of everyone,” said Enoch Jengre, program officer of Ghana’s Legal Resource Center. “No human being or institution should have the right to take the life of another.”
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Capital punishment is becoming less common on the African continent. According to the advocacy group World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, 26 African countries had outlawed the practice outright, while Ghana and 14 others had all but stopped executions, as of 2022.
About 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 AP.com reports.
As of Monday, Ghana had 172 men and 6 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.
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“By and large the general populace have accepted that (the death penalty) may not be useful,” said Accra-based criminal lawyer Francis Gasu.
The lawyer said judicial errors are too common, and police investigations are too flawed, to stand by the practice.
While abolishing the death penalty is popular among human rights groups and legal experts, not everyone in Ghana believes it should end.
“It is going to encourage some people to engage in crime knowing that they will only end up in prison after conviction,” said Raymond Kuudaah, a social worker in Accra.