Amnesty urges Reps to prioritise human rights

Global rights group, Amnesty International, has called on the House of Representatives to prioritise the protection of the fundamental human rights of Nigerians through regular public hearings on rights violations.

AI Nigeria’s Country Director, Osai Ojigho, made the call at a stakeholders’ dialogue session on the state of human rights in Nigeria organised by the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre with support from the National Endowment for Democracy in Abuja.

Scores of youths who were arrested for participating in the October 2020 #EndSARS protests have yet to be released from prisons across Nigeria, according to Amnesty International.

But Ojigho explained that regular public hearings offered victims of human rights violations an opportunity to share their complaints and were given protection to face the alleged perpetrators.

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“It is important that the House of Representatives makes these hearings a feature of their mandate and use the reports as an advocacy tool to seek and obtain justice for victims and their families,” she said.

She noted the investigation and prosecution of officers suspected of committing violations remained a mirage while #EndSARS panel reports from over 20 states and at the federal level were largely not publicly published with little or no information on their implementation.

 “This erodes public confidence and has contributed to impunity. The Nigerian authorities at state and federal levels need to ensure that every person’s human rights are protected without distinction. The time to end impunity is now,” she added.

Also speaking, a researcher at Human Rights Watch Africa, Anietie Ewang, said Nigeria had a lot to do in ensuring that its citizens enjoyed their fundamental rights.

Ewang said, “We have seen a decline in key areas of human rights that can consolidate our democracy. We see that issues around freedom of expression are been threatened; the right to protest, we have seen security forces carrying out abuses without accountability or justice for victims.

“They are both systemic failures and the lack of political will that we are seeing come together to make it difficult for citizens to enjoy their rights. There is something that the present government also fails to priotise. We hope to see better action and improvement as we look up to the elections and a new administration coming in.”