Amnesty International (AI) on Thursday published it’s 2017 global review of the death penalty with the report showing Nigeria imposed the highest number of death sentences in the sub-Saharan Africa region in the year under review.
Nigeria in 2015 and 2016 put at least 600 people to death and had a total of 2,285 people currently on death row.
“The progress in sub-Saharan Africa reinforced its position as a beacon of hope for abolition. The leadership of countries in this region gives fresh hope that the abolition of the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment is within reach. Unfortunately, some states in Nigeria continue to expand the scope of death sentences,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty said.
He noted that the number of people on death row in Nigeria is also the highest in the region, although no executions were carried out in 2017. The Amnesty International boss decried that death sentences in the country have spiked massively over the past two years, with 171 and 527 death sentences recorded in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
According to him, the organization recorded a drop in the number of executing countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, from five in 2016 to two in 2017, with only South Sudan and Somalia known to have carried out executions.
“With governments in the region continuing to take steps to reduce and repeal the death penalty well into 2018, the isolation of the world’s remaining executing countries – such as Nigeria – could not be starker.
“Now that 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, it is high time that the rest of the world follows their lead and consigns this abhorrent punishment to the history books,” Shetty advised.
According to the report, Guinea became the 20th state in sub-Saharan Africa to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, while Kenya abolished the mandatory death penalty for murder. It stated that Burkina Faso and Chad also took giant steps to repeal this punishment with new or proposed laws.
The report also shows that Botswana and Sudan resumed executions in 2018. Overall, the reports showed that at least 993 people were executed and 2,591 were sentenced to death in 2017. These numbers don’t include thousands of executions believed to have been carried out in China, where data on the use of the death penalty remained classified as a state secret.
