Both Lesotho, a tiny landlocked nation completely surrounded by the Republic of South Africa, and Swaziland, an enclave between Mozambique and South Africa, are de facto abolitionist, defined as a country in which the death penalty remains a lawful sentence but no executions have occurred for ten years or more. Both countries have very small death rows and international postures that are receptive toward abolition. The death penalty regimes of Lesotho and Swaziland have been profoundly influenced by their larger and more powerful neighbor, South Africa. Despite optimism that the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa would provide a model for other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the South African case has proven to be exceptional. Nonetheless, the de facto extinction of capital punishment in the two countries since the late 1980s could be seen as a collateral consequence of abolition in South Africa, not least because extradition treaties with South Africa and Mozambique discourage capital punishment.

Although this chapter treats Lesotho and Swaziland together, their death penalty legal regimes and domestic political contexts differ. Both countries are small traditional monarchies with significant resource constraints that resisted incorporation into South Africa during the colonial period. Lesotho has a more unstable if more democratic political system than Swaziland does, but the absolute nature of the Swazi monarchy severely limits fundamental rights. Lesotho, like Botswana, adheres to the old South African doctrine of extenuating circumstances in which a death penalty is mandatory unless the judge specifically finds mitigating factors exist (though, like Botswana, Lesotho no longer places the onus of showing extenuating circumstances on the defendant). By contrast, Swaziland's new 2005 constitution prohibits the mandatory death penalty, which ensures that judges always have discretion to substitute a lesser sentence, even absent extenuating circumstances. In any event, trial judges in both countries issue death sentences extremely rarely, and appellate courts uphold them even less frequently still.