The Monitor - Rick Halperin News

UGANDA: NGO Repeats Plea to Abolish Death Penalty

Friends of Hope For Condemned Prisoners (FHCP), a Ugandan NGO has called on government to immediately abolish the death penalty on all criminal cases, saying the sentence is not deterrent.

Giving his views to the Constitutional Review Commission at the UMA show ground in Nakawa yesterday, the FHCP Project Planning Co-ordinator, Joseph Ssebuwufu, said that after scrutinising the 1996 and 2001 presidential elections he discovered that most Ugandans are against the death penalty. He added that some of the convicts were sentenced on the basis of "planted" evidence.

 "In both elections, a man who was a wanted criminal in the 1980s -- one who was wanted dead or alive for treason and murder -- was voted in the office of the highest status in Uganda, leaving many men of a long standing spotless record," Ssebuwufu, referring to President Yoweri Museveni.

 "If Museveni had been apprehended and sentenced to death, Ugandans would have missed such a useful person, who is reformed today," Ssebuwufu said in his paper, which the commission displayed.

 "Another example is that of Col. Dr. Kizza Besigye. The same man, who was also a rebel, fighting an established government which came to power through an election certified by international observers to have been free and fair, managed to get over 2 million [votes] in his favour during the 2001 elections," Ssebuwufu added.

 He said he had also realised that judges do not support the death penalty, which he recommended to be substituted with life imprisonment. He said that although some laws give judges powers to sentence people to death for crimes such as rape and defilement, they have been using their discretion not to sentence people to death.

"This means that given an alternative, judges would not [pass] death sentences," Ssebuwufu said. States without the death penalty have better records on homicide rates. During the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been between 48% and 101% higher than in those without the death penalty.