Burkina Faso soldiers patrol aboard a pickup truck on the road from Dori to the Goudebo refugee camp, on February 3, 2020.
Burkina Faso’s unelected parliament has unanimously adopted a new penal code that restores the death penalty for high treason, terrorism, acts of espionage, parricide and importation of expired or prohibited products. The country had abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes in 2018 while its last known judicial execution took place in 1988.
Reinstating capital punishment sends a chilling message to critics of the military junta and risks becoming another tool to suppress dissent. Since the September 2022 military coup, Burkina Faso’s junta has steadily dismantled civic and political rights. Authorities have banned media outlets, suspended unions and civil society organizations, abolished multiparty politics, and subjected critics to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, unlawful conscription, and torture.
Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala defended the decision to reinstate the death penalty as a necessary measure to combat terrorism. He said that armed groups exploited the previous law’s leniency by promising new recruits they would face no more than life imprisonment if convicted of terrorist acts.
Human Rights Watch opposes all capital punishment because of its inherent cruelty. The unfairness of death sentences in Burkina Faso would be exacerbated by the country’s ill-equipped justice system. All terrorism-related cases are handled by the Specialized Judicial Unit Against Terrorism-Related Crimes, established in 2017. Human Rights Watch documented in April the special court’s slow investigations and serious procedural failures that undermine defendants’ fair trial rights.
A former terrorism court judge once explained to me that judges sometimes kept suspects in detention despite insufficient evidence, fearing
