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Carolyn Hoyle and Parvais Jabbar
ZIMBABWE has not executed anyone who was sentenced to death since 2005.
With the passing of the Death Penalty Abolition Act 2024 on December 31, Zimbabwe has become the 127th country in the world to end capital punishment.
This process began with the introduction to Parliament of an opposition private member’s Bill led by Mr Edwin Mushoriwa, though some amendments were made by the Government.
Other countries, too, have been moving away from the death penalty.
In Africa, only seven of the 55 states in the African Union (AU) are “actively retentionist”, meaning they sentence people to death and have carried out executions in the last decade. These states include Egypt, Somalia and South Sudan. Twenty-six African countries have abolished the death penalty in law. The most recent countries to do so include Ghana, the Central African Republic and Zambia. Fourteen others within the AU have moratoriums on executions.
Some governments that retain the death penalty, such as Kenya, claim they cannot abolish it while there is considerable public support for capital punishment.
Until now, this had been true in Zimbabwe, too.
Over a decade ago, Zimbabwe’s then-Minister of Justice, now the President, Dr ED Mnangagwa, expressed his commitment to abolition, condemning the death penalty as an “odious and obnoxious provision”.
But a change in policy was not forthcoming because some Zimbabwean politicians claimed in discussions with rights organisations that the public was committed to the retention of capital punishment.
The Death Penalty Project has done research in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean that has shown repeatedly that such perceptions — about public opinion being strongly in favour of retention of the death penalty — are false.
In 2017, we conducted a survey of 1 200 Zimbabweans for data on public attitudes to the death penalty.
We found that most people knew and cared little about capital punishment.
While 61 percent said they supported the death penalty, most said they would accept abolition if it were Government policy.
In 2019, we conducted in-depth interviews with 42 Zimbabwean opinion leaders.
They included politicians, legal practitioners and religious, civil society and media leaders. An overwhelming majority (90 percent) were in support of abolition.
Zimbabweans should feel proud to have joined the global majority that has consigned the death penalty to the past.
In so doing, Zimbabweans have discarded a punishment that breaches the human rights of all those subject to it; which risks the execution of innocent people; which has a disproportionate impact on the poor and uneducated; and which does not reduce violent crime any more than a long prison sentence would.
The road to abolition
The Zimbabwean path to abolition began about a decade ago, with a road map to gather evidence for advocacy and engagement with influential local institutions and politicians. The Death Penalty Project — a UK-based charity that provides free legal assistance to those facing capital punishment around the world and commissions research to assist advocacy efforts — and Veritas, a Harare-based non-governmental organisation, set out to publish empirical studies on public views on the death penalty.
This would test Government claims that there was majority support for capital punishment. In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, public knowledge on things like the number or method of executions was limited.
When we carried out our survey, we found that six out of 10 people supported retention of the death penalty. However, less than half were certain that it should definitely be kept.
When presented with a range of typical death penalty cases, by way of a series of scenarios, most respondents were against the imposition of the death penalty in five out of the six cases.
When asked what policies were likely to be most effective at reducing violent crimes, only 8 percent referred to executions.
Most respondents favoured better moral education of young people and reducing poverty — social policy rather than criminal justice responses. Perhaps most importantly, 80 percent of those who supported the death penalty made it clear that they would be willing to accept abolition if it were to become Government policy.
In our study of opinion leaders, we found that those who could shape policy in Zimbabwe were much better informed on the death penalty than the public.
Almost two-thirds did not trust the criminal justice system to prevent miscarriage of justice. Most respondents were concerned about wrongful convictions and innocent people being sentenced to death.
The 90 percent who supported abolition were not only concerned about safety.
Most believed the death penalty to be an abuse of human rights, against their religious beliefs, a poor deterrent and a stain on Zimbabwe’s international reputation.
Like the public, the majority of opinion leaders felt social policies to reduce poverty and educate the young were likely to be more effective in reducing violent crime than recourse to the criminal process.
Furthermore, most (rightly) assumed that the public would accept a decision by Parliament to abolish the death penalty.
While ultimately abolition in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, was achieved through the political leadership, efforts by local and international civil society organisations also played a role. — The Conversation
Professor Carolyn Hoyle is the director of the Death Penalty Research Unit, Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, while Parvais Jabbar is the co-founder and co-executive director of the Death Penalty Project. He is also visiting professor of practice, University of Oxford.
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