OUAGADOUGOU
Burkina Faso's parliament has voted to restore the death penalty, nearly a decade after the West African country abolished capital punishment, the Justice Ministry said in a statement reported by Reuters on Wednesday. The 71-member assembly adopted the revised penal code unanimously on Tuesday, after Justice Minister Edasso Rodrigue Bayala presented the bill on behalf of the government.
The revised code reintroduces the death penalty for crimes including terrorism, espionage and treason, and for importing expired or banned products that result in death, state-run media reported. Reporting carried by AFP through the state news agency added patricide to the list of capital offences described in the new code. The vote completes a legislative path that began when the Council of Ministers first approved the draft bill last year, and it reverses the abolition Burkina Faso enacted in 2018. According to Amnesty International, the country's last known judicial execution was in 1988.
The government's case: an insurgency and a penal code it calls too lenient
The government has presented the change as part of its response to a years-long Islamist insurgency linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions, Reuters reported. Bayala argued that the relative lenience of the previous penal code helped armed groups recruit members, and the justice ministry has framed the wider reform as intended to strengthen public order and protect people and property. The revised code is broader than the death penalty provisions alone: it also stiffens penalties for economic crimes, with life imprisonment available in major embezzlement cases, as part of a package officials say is meant to strengthen accountability.
Burkina Faso has been ruled by a military government led by Captain Ibrahim Traore since the September 2022 coup. The transitional assembly that voted on Tuesday is unelected, a fact that sits at the center of the criticism the decision has drawn: a legislature installed under military rule has now restored a punishment the country's elected-era code removed in 2018, and it did so without a single dissenting vote among its 71 members.
Rights groups warned this was coming, and say what it risks
Human Rights Watch said, when the Council of Ministers first approved the bill last year, that reinstating the death penalty could deepen repression, entrench a climate of fear and send a chilling message to critics of the military government. In its statement at the time, the organization said restoring the penalty sends a chilling message to critics, and it documented a broader pattern since the 2022 coup in which authorities have suppressed civic space, silenced media and opposition voices, and used an emergency law to detain and forcibly conscript journalists, political opponents, dissidents and judges. Amnesty International likewise opposed the proposal while it was a draft, warning that the death penalty could be used to punish dissent.
The government's answer to that criticism is the security emergency itself. Burkina Faso remains one of the central flashpoints of the Sahel's armed conflict, where groups affiliated with al Qaeda and the Islamic State have waged war against the state and committed atrocities against civilians since 2012, and where the junta's counterinsurgency has itself drawn sustained criticism from rights monitors. Ministers argue that a state fighting for control of its own territory cannot hold its penal code to the standards of peacetime, and that the prospect of execution for terrorism, espionage and treason is a deterrent aimed at the networks the insurgency depends on, including the collaborators and recruiters Bayala pointed to in the chamber.
A near-40-year gap since the last execution
Whatever the new code says on paper, Burkina Faso has not carried out a judicial execution since 1988, nearly four decades ago, and abolished the penalty outright in 2018 under former President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, a move international rights organizations praised at the time as aligning the country with a global trend: more than 170 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice or maintain moratoriums on its use. Tuesday's vote moves Burkina Faso in the opposite direction from that trend, and it does so at a moment when several of its neighbours in the Sahel are also governed by military juntas that have tightened penal and civic rules in the name of security.
What remains unclear is the practical path from statute to sentence. The precise wording of the adopted provisions and the date they take effect have not yet been published in full, and questions that will decide how the law operates, including which courts will hear capital cases and what appellate protections apply, are still to be answered by the texts themselves. What is settled after Tuesday is the direction: the death penalty is back in Burkina Faso's penal code, restored unanimously, justified by its government as a weapon against an insurgency, and condemned by rights groups as a tool that could just as readily be turned on dissent. Previously will follow the code's entry into force and the first cases brought under it in its world news coverage.
