Under Article 1 of the Constitution, the human person is sacred and inviolable

In January 2013, after ten consecutive years without carrying out executions, the Democratic Republic of the Congo became a “de facto abolitionist” country.
The current Constitution, in place since early 2006, recognises the “right to life” and the “inviolable nature of human beings.” A proposition for an article explicitly abolishing the death penalty was rejected by the national Parliament during the text’s elaboration in 2005. Aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, treason, spying, political and military offences and genocide are punishable by death.
The last executions took place on 7 January 2003, when fifteen people, charged with crimes such as subversion of the State, treason, armed robbery and participation in organised crime, were executed in secret at a military camp close to Kinshasa’s Ndjili airport. These were the first executions known to have taken place since the lifting, on September 23, 2002, of a moratorium on executions announced by then-Human Rights Minister Leonard She Okitundu on 10 December 1999. The executions of the 15 were ordered by the Court d’ordre militaire (COM) a special itinerant tribunal that, since its creation in 1997, had been responsible for the execution of some 200 individuals. The COM was abolished on 24 April 2003.
On 28 June 2003 during a meeting with a Hands off Cain delegation in Kinshasa, President Joseph Kabila declared that he would not authorise any executions, not even those of the men condemned for the assassination of his father Laurent. Since then, numerous death sentences have been handed down by Courts and Military Tribunals, but none have been carried out. A bill to abolish the death penalty was rejected by the Congolese National Assembly on 25 November 2010. In late 2011, President Kabila was re-elected for a second five-year term.
In 2013, at least 26 new death sentences were issued in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to Amnesty International. Most were imposed by military courts for crimes including murder, possession of weapons and “conspiracy”; two were imposed by civilian courts for murder.
On 20 December 2012, the Democratic Republic of the Congo abstained from the Resolution on a Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty at the UN General Assembly.