EXTRAJUDICIAL, ARBITRARY, AND SUMMARY EXECUTIONS IN NIGERIA

By Osas Justy Erhabor, Esq.

The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999), as amended, by S.33(1) provides that “[e]very persons has a right to life, and no one shall be deprived intentionally of his life, save in execution of the sentence of a Court in respect of a criminal offence of which he has been found guilty in Nigeria.”

This is the constitutional provision safeguarding the right to life of all persons in Nigeria and this Constitution is the fundamental law of the land and any other contrary provision in any other Law in Nigeria is void for such inconsistency with the Constitution.

There are exceptions to the above provision, whereby the law allows persons to use deadly force if such actions are reasonable, warranted by the circumstances, and carried out to prevent greater harm or harm to others. Specifically, the Constitution provides one may use lethal force:

(a) for the defence of any person from unlawful violence or for the defence of property;
(b) in other to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained; or
(c) for the purpose of suppressing a riot, insurrection or mutiny.

Despite the Constitution's clear mandates, there have been daily, gross violations of this Constitutional safeguard to the right to life by security operatives, particularly the Nigeria police.

The highest and may be, the most brazen form of extrajudicial killing with impunity was the killing of several persons in Awka, Anambra State of Eastern Nigeria in January 2013.

On 19th of January 2013, news broke out that more than 50 corpses were found floating in Ezu River in Awka, the capital city of Anambra State. The River is the boundary between Anambra and Enugu States of Nigeria. The bizarre pictures of floating corpses were shown in Television and published in various newspapers.

As the First Vice President of the Nigerian Bar Association, I was alarmed by the enormity of the incident. I was also then Chair of the NBA Human Rights Committee, which investigated incidents of extrajudicial killings, including arbitrary and summary executions in Nigeria.

The Committee’s findings were truly alarming. We interviewed locals who described seeing between 60-67 corpses floating in the river on that fateful morning. They described the grotesque sight in unprintable details.

The final result of our investigations indicted the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigerian Police at Awkuzu, few kilometres from Awka, where the unlawful execution of the alleged robbery suspects and their corpses were dumped in the river. Extrajudicial deaths are so common in this area that the locals considered the incident routine, the exception being the huge numbers of corpses involved. According to them, suspected criminals are routinely brought out of cells and executed, without trial or conviction by a Court of Law.

Even though our report was made public with copies sent to appropriate authority and governmental Agencies, no action has been taking against the Police to date. It is this impunity that is fuelling the circle of extra judicial killings in the Country.

There have also been reports of commercial vehicles drivers being shot and killed by officers at various highway security checkpoints.

On 29 April 2014, a hotelier was reportedly shot dead by a senior police officer, who is the head of a police division in the full glare of the public in Ilesa, Osun State, West of Nigeria. The matter has since been 'swept under the carpet' and the families of the deceased secretly pacified due to public outcry.

There have been other murders, including the Apo killing of a pregnant woman in Abuja by the operatives of State Security Service and the killing of a pregnant woman in Mpape, also in Abuja. The pregnant woman in Mpape was a passenger in a taxi cab that stopped to drop off another passenger in front of Bank. According to our reports, one of the policemen guarding the Bank opened fire at the cab killing the woman.

There is also the killing of four Ibo boys in Lagos by the police who effected their arrest on mere suspicion of being armed robbers. They were arrested at their respective homes, taken to the police station, and allegedly shot dead. The Human Rights Committee of the NBA, under my leadership, filed an action in Lagos High Court against the police and the Attorney General of the Federation. The action is still pending in Court.

The Legal Defence And Assistance Project (LEDAP) documents most of these killings. For example, in 2011 LEDAP reported that 491 incidents resulted in the deaths of 1,989 people. Of those deaths, 128  were classified as extrajudicial executions and 1,861 were classified as summary killings.

Perhaps the most worrisome of these extrajudicial killings, are those carried out by civilian mobs. It is a common occurrence today that if a petty thief or burglar is apprehended, a mob will immediately gather around him or her. The suspect is then beaten to death or given the tire treatment, whereby a rubber tire is put round his neck and set afire, burning the suspect alive). This exercise is locally referred to as 'jungle justice'. And it is perpetuated by a mutual mistrust between the police, judicial system, and civilian populace.

The extrajudicial killings carried out in the North-East of the Country are now being ignored or justified as a war zone matter with Boko Haram insurgents and the military locked in battle resulting in daily killings on both sides.

To restore confidence in the current system and reduce the likelihood of mob related extrajudicial killings, the Nigerian government must reign in its police and military forces; make security personnel accountable; and strengthen its criminal justice system so that it is an effective mechanism for dealing with person or group accused of committing extrajudicial, arbitrary, or summary executions.

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Osas Justy Erhabor, Esq. works and resides in Nigeria. He is the Vice Chair of Special Projects for the ABA SIL International Human Rights Committee. 

Osas Justy Erhabor Esq,
Past First Vice President, Nigerian Bar Association,
Vice Chair, American Bar Association SIL IHRC
O J ERHABOR & COMPANY
Duraclean Building,
Email – justy.erhabor@yahoo.co.uk
Mobile- +2348034709191

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