Ghana’s Parliament on Tuesday (25 July) voted to remove the death penalty from the 1960 Criminal and Other Offences Act and the 1962 Armed Forces Act, replacing it with a life sentence.
This adds Ghana making to the list of several African nations that have moved to repeal capital punishment in recent years.
No one has been executed in Ghana since 1993, although 176 people were on death row as of last year, according to the Ghana Prisons Service.
The new bill will amend the state’s Criminal Offences Act to substitute life imprisonment for the death penalty, according to a parliamentary committee report. President Nana Akufo-Addo is yet to assent for the law to take effect.
Ghana is the 29th country to abolish the death penalty in Africa and the 124th globally, according to The Death Penalty Project, a London-based NGO which said it worked alongside partners in Ghana to help get the law changed.
Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, and Zambia are among the latest African states to have ended capital punishment in the last two years.
Since 1977, Amnesty International has been campaigning for the global abolition of the death penalty.
In November 2022, in a statement to a delegation from Amnesty International Ghana, the President of Ghana expressed the need to remove the death penalty from the statute books.
Amnesty International’s latest report on the global use of the death penalty in 2022 shows that seven new death sentences were handed down in Ghana, bringing the total of people facing the death penalty in the country to 176 by the end of the year. However, no executions have been carried out since 1993.