Report: EA homicide rate low

THE East African Region is ranked second in Africa with minimum rate of incidences related to extrajudicial killings of women in the continent, the ‘Daily News’ has reliably learnt.

According to the African Human Rights Yearbook Volume 1(2017) released yesterday, the highest homicide rate in 2013 was in Southern Africa, covering about 30 per 100,000, followed by West Africa with 16 per 100,000, while East Africa has 8 per 100,000, followed by North Africa with 3 per 100,000.

“These figures paint an interesting broad picture of unlawful killings in Africa and give some general idea of the phenomenon of extrajudicial killing in the continent,” reads part of the book published recently by three institutions comprising the African regional human rights system.

The institutions are the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Comm-ission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.

The book indicates, however, that the figures are not current. More importantly, it is indicated, such figures are not disaggregated by gender and by categories of violent killings and they also do not deal with the specific problem of women and extrajudicial killing in Africa.

Extrajudicial killing is a complex phenomenon covering various types of unlawful homicide. When women are the targeted victims, it constitutes an extreme form of gender violence.

The book further states that the 2014 general study on the subject by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights in Cambridge University provides some useful data on unlawful killings taken from a number of sources, some dependable, some not.

Extrapolating from that data, one would note that an average of about 3,000 unlawful killings take place each year in Africa. There were 128,623 persons who died in Africa in 2011 as a result of interpersonal violence, compared with 486,493 persons worldwide in the same year.

It is stated further that in Sub- Sahara Africa, 15 796 people died in 2011 of collective violence, while 86 307 died worldwide in the same year.

“Drawing from various data sources, Centre of Governance and Human Rights in Cambridge University estimates the 2013 homicide rate in Africa to be 11.4 per 100 000, a slightly over 110 killed each year per one million people. That rate is double the global rate of 5.8 per 100 000,” it is further stated.

An extrajudicial killing, also known as extra judicial execution, is the killing of a person by governmental authorities without the sanction of any judicial proceeding or legal process.

These often targets leading political, trade union, dissident, religious, and social figures and are only those carried out by the government or other state authorities like the armed forces or police, as extra-legal fulfillment of their prescribed role. Extrajudicial killing of women is an extreme form of violence against women by men or by other women.


Estimating the actual occurrence of this phenomenon is difficult in part because killings of this nature tend to be statistically subsumed under generic legal rubric of homicide and is largely hidden.