Courts struggle as murder rate among world's top six

Lesotho, with a population of just more than 2m, has the sixth highest murder rate in the world as its under-funded judiciary sits with a backlog of thousands of untried cases. The Guardian reports that a recent World Population Review report found that the global average murder rate is seven per 100 000 people, and Lesotho had a rate almost six times higher at 41.25. The report ranked Lesotho as only safer than El Salvador (82.84 per 100 000 people), Honduras (56.52), Venezuela (56.33), Virgin Islands (49.26) and Jamaica (47.01). Lesotho has more murders than countries in conflict such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Mozambique. DRC has a homicide score of 13.55, and Mozambique 3.4. SA has 33.97 murders per 100 000 people and is the only other Southern African Development Community country in the top 10 for highest rates of murder. In the past three months, six police officers have been killed in Lesotho, three of them in the past three weeks. In May, High Court and Appeal Court registrar Mathato Sekoai said the government had allocated just R937 366 to be shared by all the country’s courts, including the High Court and Court of Appeal, for April to June this year. The paltry allocation was in contravention of section 118(3) of the Constitution, which mandates the government to ‘accord such assistance as the courts may require to enable them to protect their independence, dignity and effectiveness, subject to the Constitution or any other law’. A crippled judiciary coupled with police ineptitude has led to some murderers walking free despite gruesome killings. Police have often blamed the huge number of unlicensed firearms that enter Lesotho from SA through porous borders. But analysts say this does not explain why well-known criminals are rarely taken to court; or why, when cases are taken to court, there are few convictions.