Capital punishment debate in Zambia

Courts in Zambia have sentenced at least ten people to death by hanging over the past three months, prompting new controversy over capital punishment.

About a-hundred people are now on death row in Zambia, including fifty-nine former soldiers sentenced for their role in a failed military coup in October, 1997.

Correspondents say that the most recent convictions, involving lesser crimes such as aggravated robbery, have led human rights activists and church leaders to step up their campaign to abolish the death penalty.

Correspondents point out that despite the recent surge in death sentences, no one has actually been executed in Zambia since 1997, when President Frederick Chiluba signed the death warrants of four convicts who had waited years on death row. A spokesman for the Intgern-African Network for Human Rights and Development, Nganda Mwanajiti said this was torture of the worst kind, with men bveing haunted every day.

Mr Mwanajiti said there were other ways of punishing offenders rather than taking life.