Burkina Faso’s parliament unanimously votes to reinstate the death penalty

The parliament in the West African junta-run nation of Burkina Faso has adopted a new penal code reinstating the death penalty for crimes including terrorism, espionage and treason.

According to the country’s justice minister, Edasso Rodrigue Bayala, all 71 members of the Burkina Faso legislature unanimously voted in favor of adopting the new penal code on Tuesday.

The development ends the abolition of the death penalty, which had been in effect since 2018 under the previous and democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore. The last known execution in Burkina Faso took place in 1988, according to Human Rights Watch.

The junta’s Council of Ministers approved a bill reinstating capital punishment in December, prompting a backlash from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which criticized the move as repressive and an effort to suppress dissent.

In 2024, Bayala announced that “the issue of the death penalty … is being discussed (and) will be implemented.”

The military junta has previously been accused of targeting dissidents by detaining human rights defenders and journalists. It also dissolved all political parties in the country and scrapped the laws governing them earlier this year.

The move comes as landlocked Burkina Faso, a country of 23 million people, grapples with a security crisis as authorities battle militant groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

Both government forces and militants from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, an al-Qaida-aligned group, have been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by rights groups. A Human Rights Watch report this year said government forces killed over twice as many civilians as jihadis between 2023 and 2025.