Amnesty International: No One To Trust, Nowhere To Turn In Nigeria

Amnesty International has been documenting and highlighting human rights abuses perpetrated by both Boko Haram and government security forces in northeast Nigeria for some time – those abuses were a key theme of a trip I made to Nigeria in 2012. But this latest research has uncovered incontrovertible evidence – including video footage – of extrajudicial executions and other serious violations by the Nigerian military and Boko Haram, on a truly horrifying scale.

Some of the video footage, images and testimonies collated have now been verified and an edited version of some of it will be released today. Graphic evidence of multiple war crimes is not easy to watch. But for President Goodluck Jonathan, his government ministers and military commanders it should be compulsory viewing. They should watch not despite it being hard to watch – they should watch because it is so hard to watch.

The footage includes deeply disturbing images of what appear to be members of the Nigerian armed forces and Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a state-sponsored militia, executing detainees. One of the videos shows 16 young men seated in a line. One by one they are called forward and forced to lie down in front of a pit where their throats are slit and their bodies dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave.

The footage shows five young men killed in this way. The fate of the others is not captured on film but eyewitness accounts confirmed that nine of them had their throats cut while the others were shot dead.

These were among the over 600 extrajudicial executions that had taken place in and around Maiduguri on March 14 after the Nigerian military went on a rampage following Boko Haram’s attack on the military detention centre in Giwa Barracks earlier that day.

Other footage, taken in late July 2013, shows a mass arbitrary arrest of alleged Boko Haram members by the Nigerian military and CJTF – a common operation known as a “screening”. Arriving in the town of Bama in the morning, the security forces rounded all the men up in the central market, forcing them to strip. About 300 of them were released, up to 35 were accused of being Boko Haram members and ordered to lie down. Footage shows them being beaten with sticks and machetes before being loaded onto a military vehicle. They were taken away to the local military barracks and on July 29 they were all brought to their communities and shot dead, their corpses dumped around the town.

This was not the first time that the population of Bama had been “screened”, nor is it just the military who inflicts such abuses on the inhabitants. Over the years, Boko Haram has launched a series of deadly attacks against Bama, apparently in retaliation for what the armed group deems to be the locals’ cooperation with the Nigerian military.

Amnesty International has unearthed footage of the aftermath of Boko Haram’s most deadly assault on the town in which they killed nearly 100 people over the course of several hours on February 19. The video shows scores of corpses wrapped for burial.

Thus, the people of Bama are caught between the ruthless attacks by Boko Haram and the routine serious violations by the Nigerian security forces. That experience is mirrored in towns and villages across Borno state. It is little wonder that so many have fled or are living in a state of constant fear.

As the bloody insurgency waged by Boko Haram since 2009 has intensified, so, too, has the brutality of the Nigerian government’s response. Rural communities caught in the middle are terrorised by Boko Haram, on the one hand, and by the very military whose duty it is to protect them, on the other.

More than 4,000 Nigerians, the majority of them civilians, have been killed by both sides in this year alone. This includes the 600 people extrajudicially executed by the Nigerian military in Maiduguri in March. Last month, the town of Damboa fell to Boko Haram and in a separate incident in Kaduna state, 12 people appear to have been killed while in custody by the Nigerian military after being arrested during an apparently peaceful protest in which 21 other protesters were also killed after the military opened fire on them.

The gruesome footage from northeastern Nigeria is deeply troubling. More disturbing still is that these incidents of murderous brutality are only the tip of a larger iceberg. Our research suggests that the extrajudicial executions are part of a pattern of human rights violations by the Nigerian military and its civilian “helpers”, the CJTF.

As today’s revelations make clear, an immediate, impartial, independent, and thorough investigation is urgently needed to look into these serious and systematic violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in northeastern Nigeria.

The Nigerian government must publicly condemn such crimes and ensure an end to the human rights violations being carried out by the Nigerian military, including arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions. Above all, we must not see the simple denial of responsibility that we have seen far too often before.

“When two elephants fight, it is the grass that is trampled,” says an old African proverb. Nowhere is that truer than in northeastern Nigeria today. The people there have no one they can trust and they have nowhere they can turn. In the words of another proverb, “They have nothing left but their eyes to cry with.”

This Op-ed was originally published in Al-Jazeera

IHRC: World Can No Longer Ignore North Korea's Appalling Human Rights Record

Members of the International Human Rights Committee have long been concerned with the human rights situation in North Korea (DPRK). In 2012, the Committee submitted a proposal for a program at the London Fall 2013 meeting to explore whether human rights violations in the DPRK amounted to crimes against humanity. With the help of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea that program occurred. David Hawk, former executive director of Amnesty International and seasoned human rights investigator, summarized his findings on the DPRK concentration camp system including years of research showing the torture, execution and other gross human rights violations which occur within the camps. His presentation was supported by satellite imagery which showed the location of and changes within the camps – even though the DPRK persistently denies their existence. 

Based on the work of Hawk and others, the situation in the DPRK earned the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Council. On February 7, 2014, it released its Report on the Detailed Findings of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (A/HRC/25/CRP.1) The Report was issued after the Council established a Commission of Inquiry in March of 2013 to investigate the human rights abuses that have occurred in the DPRK. In addition to meeting with the representatives of various governments, the Council conducted public hearings and more than 240 confidential interviews. 


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The Report documents, among other violations, mass suppression of freedom of expression, widespread discrimination, torture, forced abortion and infanticide, monopolization of food access, public executions and enforced disappearance and the maintenance of political prison camps. In its report of nearly 400 pages, the Council concluded what many working on the DPRK problem already knew, namely that human rights abuses have been occurring in that country on a mass scale for decades. The Report concludes that “Systemic, widespread and gross human rights violates have been, and are being, committed by the [DPRK], its institutions and officials. In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the Commission constitute crimes against humanity.” The Council also concluded:

The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. 

The Council propounded lengthy recommendations to the DPRK and other states, including China. In particular, the Council recommended that China cease the policy of forcibly repatriating individuals to the DPRK and that it and other states extend asylum to those from the DPRK that are within its borders. The Council recommended that the Security Council refer the DPRK situation to the International Criminal Court and adopt targeted sanctions against the perpetrators. 

For those suffering in the DPRK, the Report is a long awaited recognition by an international body of the long-standing human rights violations in that State. The International Community should not continue to ignore the human rights situation in the DPRK and should not allow the DPRK’s nuclear bluster to force attention away from these problems. The International Community should follow the recommendations of the Report and support a referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC). As a world power, China should recognize its ability to exercise leadership in this situation. It should take the first step by extending asylum to DPRK citizens who escape into China and the next by supporting a referral of the matter to the ICC. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un should break the cycle of abuse created by his grandfather and perpetuated by his father and immediately initiate reforms. 

The suffering of the DPRK population tests the strength of international law and the limits of sovereignty. It is difficult to imagine how a State could violate fundamental human rights worse than what the DPRK has done with impunity for decades. If international law cannot affect a change for the people of the DPRK, one can’t help but wonder whether it has any teeth at all. 

-Gregory W. MacKenzie, Esq.

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Gregory W. MacKenzie is a Partner at Hurley, Toevs, Styles, Hamblin & Panter, P.A. (Albuquerque, NM) and an active member of the ABA Section of International Law, International Human Rights Committee.