Aggravated murder, spying and armed robbery are capital crimes.

Aggravated murder, spying and armed robbery are capital crimes.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema has ruled the country since seizing power in a military coup d'etat in 1979, when he deposed his uncle and first post independence president (from Spain in 1968) Francisco Nguema.
Obiang Nguema had his uncle tried and executed. He proclaimed an amnesty for refugees (Nguema had caused a third of the population to flee through widespread human rights abuses) and released some 5,000 political prisoners. However, he kept the absolute control he had inherited.
President Obiang Nguema won Equatorial Guinea's first-ever multiparty presidential election in 1996 with 99% of the vote, amid reports of widespread fraud and irregularities. He was re-elected with 97.1 percent of the vote and 98 percent of registered voters participating in a December 2002 election again marred by extensive fraud and intimidation.
The president controls most opposition parties through patronage and the police and security forces through the Minister of the Interior. The judiciary is not independent.
On April 28, 2006 a judicial source stated that the previous week saw a man, Fernando Esono, nicknamed ‘Maabis’, was put to death in the Evinayong prison courtyard, where he was being held. Before this, the last known execution was carried out in 1997. Maabis had been sentenced to death by the Malabo Appeals Court in 2004. After obtaining leave from prison some weeks before, he allegedly escaped committing two more murders. Following his arrest, the authorities swiftly shot him for the first murder without putting him on trial for other killings.
According to Amnesty International three executions took place in 2007.
On June 1, 1998 15 people (4 of them in absentia) were sentenced to death in an unfair summary military trial but on September 9 all capital sentences were commuted in detention.
On December 18, 2008 and December 21st, 2010, Equatorial Guinea was absent during the vote on the Resolution on a Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty at the UN General Assembly.