This promulgation by the Sierra-Leonese President follows the vote on 23 July by the National Assembly of the abolition law. Capital punishment is replaced by life imprisonment or for a minimum of thirty years.
Le Monde with AFP
About fifty states around the world continue to apply the death penalty, Sierra Leone is no longer part of it. The Sierra-Leonese President Julius Maada Bio promulgated on Friday 8 October, the abolition of the death penalty in this small country in West Africa.
“Today, we write again a page of history […]. After twenty years, we hold the promise that we were made as a nation: after twenty years, the sentence of Death is finally totally abolished in the Republic of Sierra Leone, “said the head of state at the signing ceremony in the capital, Freetown. This promulgation follows the vote on 23 July by the National Assembly, of the abolition law, replaced by a prison sentence or for a minimum of thirty years.
This former British West African colony was criticized by human rights defenders for not formally abolishing death sentence, even if the latest executions were more than twenty and convictions were usually commuted in perpetuity imprisonment.
There were 144 abolitionist countries in 2020
The 1991 Sierra Leonese Constitution provided for capital punishment for the aggravated flight, murder, betrayal and mutiny. The Sierra Leone is the last African country to abolish the death penalty, after Chad, last year, and Malawi, in April.
At the end of 2020, Amnesty International recorded 144 abolitionist countries in law or de facto, that is, those who did not perform executions over the last ten years. Nearly three quarters of states around the world. Among them, more than 100 abolished the death penalty legally, for all crimes, according to the NGO. Nearly half of them are in Europe and Central Asia.
More than thirty countries in Africa still maintain the death penalty in their legislation, but just under half have carried out executions in recent years. In 2020, no execution was identified in Bahrain, Belarus, Japan, Pakistan and Sudan, whereas in 2019 these countries had all implemented crucial sentences. The Gambia, Malaysia, Russia and Tajikistan maintained their moratorium on executions.