SWAZI CHILDREN WHIPPING - UPDATE

I wrote recently about how the courts in Swaziland handed out whippings as punishment to children.

What I didn’t realise was just how often this happened.

An organisation called End Corporal Punishment (ECP) campaigns all over the world for corporal punishment to be abolished. It has official statistics from the Swazi Government that show that 388 males under 18 years were sentenced to corporal punishment in 2003; 233 in 2004 and 235 in 2005.

These statistics show that corporal punishment used by courts is an everyday occurrence. But you wouldn’t know this from the Swazi media as there is hardly any reporting of this. I suspect that one reason may be that the whipping of children in Swaziland, whether it is in the home, the school or by the courts, is so commonplace that it is considered almost ‘natural’ and unworthy of comment. (Corporal punishment is also lawful as a disciplinary measure for males in penal institutions under the Prisons Act, 1964).

ECP also goes some way to answering my question about whether the whipping of children by the courts is still going on.

According to ECP, there was a High Court decision (possibly in 2005, but this is not clear) that stopped whipping as a sentence and the courts are no longer applying it, but it remains on the statute books.

If such a High Court decision has been made, it is being ignored in some places. I said in my previous post that the Swazi News reported a case of a 14-year-old boy being whipped in March 2006. Also, the human rights group Amnesty International in its 2006 report on Swaziland said (in passing) that the corporal punishment of juveniles still took place (it made no reference to any High Court decision).

The ECP report also reveals that according to article 84 of the Magistrates Court Act, magistrates cannot implement whipping until the High Court has reviewed the sentence. This means that many of the whippings that have taken place in the past (and may still be happening today) were / are probably illegal, because the High Court has not ruled.

From what little that is reported in the Swazi media I’d say that the sentencing of whippings is incredibly inconsistent.

Here are two examples.

The Swazi Observer (11 February 2005) reported that a 16-year-old school student was sentenced to six lashes for killing a bus conductor with a knife. This was his only sentence (no jail time or fine).

Later that year the Times of Swaziland (14 December 2005) reported on a 14-year-old boy who was given seven lashes (one more than the killer) for shoplifting a pack of underwear and a bar of chocolate.

I can’t fathom the reasoning.

Perhaps some journalist in Swaziland who regularly covers the law courts can tell us if whipping is still going on and try to explain to us the logic behind the sentencing.

See also
SWAZI CHILDREN WHIPPING STORM