Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa signs bill abolishing the death penalty

The death penalty has been officially abolished in Zimbabwe after President Emmerson Mnangagwa signed into law on Tuesday a bill commuting the sentences of some 60 people on death row to prison terms.

It has been almost twenty years since the last execution, in 2005, partly because at one point no one wanted to take on the role of executioner for the state.

The president himself was sentenced to death in the 1960s, during Zimbabwe’s war of independence.

On Tuesday, Amnesty International welcomed the new law. In a message posted on X, formerly Twitter, the human rights organisation described the measure as a great step forward for the country and a major milestone in the fight against ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment’. It also described it as a ‘ray of hope for the abolitionist movement in the region’.

The Zimbabwe leader has publicly expressed his opposition to capital punishment since 2017. He cited his own experience of being sentenced to death, which was later replaced by a ten-year prison sentence, for blowing up a train during his country’s war of liberation from white minority rule.

He also used his presidential powers on several occasions to commute the death sentences of several prisoners to life imprisonment.

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Amnesty reports that 113 countries worldwide, including 24 in Africa, have completely abolished the death penalty. According to the organisation, there were nearly 1,200 known executions worldwide in 2023, a sharp increase on the less than 900 cases recorded the previous year.