INTRODUCTION

Uganda last carried out an execution in 2003, though some reports suggest that military executions may have occurred as late as 2006. However, the country remains steadfastly supportive of the death penalty and has a posture less receptive of eventual abolition than neighboring Kenya. Unlike Kenya, which has abstained on UN General Assembly resolutions calling for a global moratorium on executions, Uganda routinely voted against until 2014, when it abstained for the first time. Statements from senior political leaders, including President Yoweri Museveni, advocate capital punishment for its deterrent value and public support. As in Kenya, the death penalty was known in the precolonial period, though most communities tended to prefer compensation to the victim in lieu of executions. The death penalty as it currently exists, however, is overwhelmingly the product of colonial rule, which persisted after independence and into the ruinous administrations of Milton Obote and Idi Amin. The reconstruction of the state after the rise of Museveni and the National Resistance Movement (NRM) led to the establishment of a new constitutional order and emerging judicial independence.

Proposals to expand the scope of capital punishment have occurred in recent years, potentially adding to an already overbroad list of capital offenses. The most infamous example was the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would have authorized the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” and certain forms of HIV/AIDS transmission.4 Although the law no longer included the death penalty by the time it passed in 2014 and has subsequently been found unconstitutional, the episode created significant resistance from civil society, the public health community, and Uganda's aid donors. Despite episodes of penal populism in a political environment best characterized as softly authoritarian, Uganda has made progress in restricting the scope of the death penalty. In 2009, the Ugandan Supreme Court invalidated the mandatory death penalty on the grounds that it overpunished and unconstitutionally constrained judicial discretion.