Under white minority rule, the apartheid-era National...

Under white minority rule, the apartheid-era National Party, the New National Party's (NNP) predecessor, executed an average of about 100 people a year in the 1980s, peaking at 187 in 1987 when 21 people were hanged in a single week at Pretoria's notorious central prison. Throughout four decades of institutionalized racial discrimination, South Africa became one of the world's leading execution centers. In 1990 a legal moratorium on executions was introduced until the sentence of inconstitutionality in 1990 and its formal scrapping by Parliament in 1997. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1997 abolishing the death penalty was passed by Parliament and brought into operation on November 13, 1998. But there have been calls for its reintroduction in a country with a murder rate 10 times higher than that of the United States, making it one of the world's most violent places outside a war zone. On May 30, 2000, Parliament ratified the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.