As reported by state television, Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo signed a new penal code into law that saw the country ending the Death Penalty on Monday. The small Central African country which is considered by Oxford University’s Death Penalty Research Unit, as one of the most authoritarian states in the world, saw its last execution in 2014.
The death penalty remains legal in 30 out of 54 African states and with the passing of this law by Parliament, Equatorial Guinea has become the latest African country to abolish the death penalty.
African retentionist states include; Chad, DRC, Egypt, Tunisia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Somalia, South Sudan, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Djibouti, Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania and Cameroon, where the death penalty is still legal.
“We hope this will pave the way for other measures to fight against human rights violations. We encourage African retentionist states to abolish the death penalty”, Amnesty International reacted to Equatorial Guinea’s action in a tweet.
According to the World Coalition Against Death Penalty, 55 states worldwide still retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes, with the top five executioners being China, Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia as of 2020. Death Penalty has been recently carried out through beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection, and shooting.
