A/HRC/11/2 page 15 48. Older scholarship tended to emphasize the pitfalls of taking the meaning and significance attached to the term “witchcraft” in any given context and seeking to transpose it to other settings.30 More recently, however, comparative studies have become much more common.31 Ronald Hutton, for example, has identified five characteristics generally shared by those who believe in witches and witchcraft across different cultures and time periods: (a) witches use non-physical means to cause misfortune or injury to others; (b) harm is usually caused to neighbours or kin rather than strangers; (c) strong social disapproval follows, in part because of the element of secrecy and in part because their motives are not wealth or prestige but malice and spite; (d) witches work within long-standing traditions, rather than in one-time only contexts; and (e) other humans can resist witches through persuasion, non-physical means (counter-magic), or deterrence including through corporal punishment, exile, fines or execution.32 2. Human rights, extrajudicial executions and witchcraft 49. The relevance of the practice of witchcraft to human rights is clearly a complex matter, and it is not possible to do justice to it within the confines of a report of this nature. Perhaps the most appropriate starting point is to examine the contexts in which attention has been brought to the human rights consequences of the phenomenon in recent years. Any such survey is inevitably incomplete, but it can nevertheless provide an insight into the nature of the challenges that need to be addressed: (a) The killing of accused witches was reported as a significant phenomenon in the Central African Republic. Articles 162 and 162 bis of the country’s criminal code indicate that a person convicted of “witchcraft” (charalatinsme and sorcellerie) can face capital punishment, a prison sentence or fine. While the death penalty does not appear to have been used recently for this purpose, there were many reports of individuals being killed by private citizens or sometimes by the army after having been accused of witchcraft;33 30 Malcolm Crick, Explorations in Language and Meaning: Toward a Semantic Anthropology (1976). 31 Ashforth has argued that, while witchcraft is not indicative of any single belief system, there may be a broadly applicable witchcraft paradigm. Adam Ashforth, “AIDS, Witchcraft and the Problem of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, Institute for Advanced Study, paper No. 10, May 2001, available at www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/paperten.pdf. 32 Ronald Hutton, “Anthropological and historical approaches to witchcraft: potential for a new collaboration?”, Historical Journal (2004), 413. 33 See A/HRC/11/2/Add.3.