Kampala — Uganda could begin enforcing the death penalty again, President Yoweri Museveni has said, 13 years after the country’s last execution.
BBC
Museveni said his “Christian background” had prevented him from going ahead with executions, but this “leniency” was encouraging criminals.
Human rights groups have warned against the move.
In Uganda, 28 offences merit the death penalty, the highest in east Africa. Some 278 people are on death row.
“I have not been assenting to hanging of convicts because of my Christian background but being lenient is causing people to think they can cause harm and get away with it,” Museveni wrote on Twitter.
He also said he would “hang a few” at a graduation ceremony for prison wardens in Kampala on Thursday.
Rights groups were quick to criticise the president.
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“Executing prisoners won’t end crime,” the executive director of Uganda’s Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, Livingstone Ssewanyana, told the Washington Post.
“The police are very weak with no capacity to investigate crimes extensively. As a result, you find serious failures in the systems.”
