RIGHTS-NIGERIA: Death Row Convicts Pardoned

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Jan 7 2000 (IPS) - Some lucky convicts, who have been on the death row for more than 20 years in Nigeria, have been pardoned by the government in the spirit of the new millennium.

The news came at the end of the Federal Executive Council meeting in the capital Abuja this week, during which Jerry Gana, Minister of Integration and Cooperation in Africa, announced the granting of the pardon by President Olusegun Obasanjo.

“All prisoners who have been awaiting execution for the past 20 years, but have not been executed, have now been granted total pardon,” he said. “Those with less than 20 years, but above 10 years, have had their sentences of death commuted to life imprisonment”.

The freed inmates, Gana said, would undergo a short course organised by the Ministry of Justice to enable them integrate smoothly into the society.

There are speculations in Nigeria that the granting of the pardon might mark the beginning of the abolition of the death penalty from the country’s constitution. “This may just be the beginning of the abolition of the death penalty,” says Segun Ladipo, a civil servant in Lagos.

The decision to pardon the inmates has been welcomed by human rights organisations in Nigeria.

“It is a welcome development but basically, we need to look at the administration of criminal justice itself,” says Onyeisi Ehiemeke.

Ohiemeke, who is head of Penal Reform and Prison Project, at the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), a human rights watchdog group in Lagos, told IPS that he does not believe the pardon was the start of the abolition of death sentence in Nigeria.

“Abolition of death penalty in Nigeria is a complex issue which needs to be properly balanced because it might lead to more crimes”, he explains.

“There is so much crime in Nigeria presently that there should first be some form of compensation to the person on whom a crime had been committed before thinking of abolishing death penalty”, he says.

Ohiemeke urged the government to provide good accommodation, sanitary facilities, vocational training skills facilities and recreational facilities in Nigerian prisons to conform with the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the treatment of prisoners.

Segun Jegede of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) told IPS this week that: “We hope the practice will continue on a periodic basis so as to decongest the overcrowded prisons.”

Inmates in Nigerian prisons comprise 50 percent of those Awaiting Trial Persons and 20 percent of those condemned to death or had served their sentences but are still in prison, according to a recent survey compiled by CDHR.

Latest statistics, published in June last year, show that there were a total of 40,598 inmates in Nigeria’s 147 prisons.

Out of this number, 60 percent comprised those who were either awaiting trial or those who had been tried and were awaiting sentence.

Equally disturbing is the fact that the growth rate of the prison population far outstrips the capacity of the prisons, with all the prisons in Nigeria holding more than their designed capacity for prisoners.

The worst case of congestion, according to a report by the Constitutional Rights Project (CRP), made available to IPS, is at Awka prisons in the Southeastern state of Anambra, with a population of 452 for a prison designed for 98 inmates. The least congested were in Oyo State’s two prisons with capacity for 496, holding 761 or 44 percent more, respectively.

The CRP attributes the high increase in prison population to a soaring crime rate and a confused criminal justice system in Nigeria.

Significant efforts towards improving conditions in the prisons and the welfare of prisoners were made in 1999 which resulted in the fall in prison population from over 50,000 to about 40,000.

Following recommendations by a committee in February last year, 646 prisoners were released in April, after which another 1,403 have been freed.

Obasanjo, who himself benefited from that pardon, had on assuming office as President in May 1999, ordered the release of all prisoners awaiting trial for offences not including murder, robbery and other under the “serious category”.

Obasanjo spent several years in detention for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government of the late dictator Sanni Abacha.