Zimbabwe hasn’t executed anyone who was sentenced to death since 2005. With the passing of the Death Penalty Abolition Act 2024 on 31 December, Zimbabwe has become the 127th country in the world to end death penalty.
This process began with the introduction to parliament of an opposition private member’s bill led by 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 are “actively retentionist”, meaning that 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. Another 14 within the African Union have moratoriums on executions.
Some governments that retain the death penalty, such as Kenya, claim that they can’t 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 president, Emmerson 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 retention.
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 a 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% said they supported the death penalty, most said they would accept abolition if it were government policy.
In 2019, we carried out in-depth interviews with 42 Zimbabwean opinion leaders. They included politicians, legal practitioners and religious, civil society and media leaders. An overwhelming majority (90%) were in support of abolition.
There remain many legitimate concerns about Zimbabwe’s criminal justice system and wider abuses of human rights, which will not be fixed by abolition. Nevertheless, 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; that risks the execution of innocent people; that has a disproportionate impact on the poor and uneducated; and that doesn’t 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 roadmap 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 the death penalty around the world and commissions research to assist advocacy efforts – and Veritas, a Harare-based NGO, 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 about 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. However, less than half were certain that the death penalty 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% 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% 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.
Read more:
Why has Kenya not abolished the death penalty? Habit and inertia
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 didn’t trust the criminal justice system to prevent miscarriages of justice. Most respondents were concerned about wrongful convictions and innocent people being sentenced to death.
The 90% who supported abolition weren’t 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 that 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.
Research for policy
In dismantling this perceived barrier to abolition, our research attracted Mnangagwa’s support. In a foreword to the opinion leaders’ study, the Zimbabwean president wrote:
Most Zimbabweans know that the death penalty is a subject on which I feel deeply. As I have said in the past, I believe it to be a flagrant violation of the right to life and dignity …. It is my sincere hope that, in the near future, Zimbabwe will formally abolish the penalty by removing it from our statute books.
While ultimately abolition in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, was achieved through political leadership, efforts by local and international civil society organisations played a significant role, and our empirical research was crucial in supporting this endeavour.
Discussion about this post