Extra- judicial Killings In The South East: Experts Ask UN, ICJ To Intervene
Some international scholarly experts including clergymen and human rights campaigners have thrown their weight behind the Expert-Leaders’ of the International Society for Civil Liberties
Some international scholarly experts including clergymen and human rights campaigners have thrown their weight behind the Expert-Leaders’ of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law - Intersociety, on extra- judicial killings of over 32,000 victims as well as abduction of several others by security agencies over the last few years in Nigeria's South East geographical zone.
They, therefore urged both the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, ICC, to swing into action by ordering thorough investigation of the alleged atrocities.
The two special international reports unveiled by Intersociety on Sunday, December 22, 2024, in Enugu contained shocking and chilling revelations regarding the “warzone” situation in Eastern Nigeria, particularly in the South-East, in the last nine years and four months from August 2015 to December 2024.
According to a statement on January 1, 2025 from Chicago, Illinois, USA, they further urged both the United Nations and ICC to intervene urgently and investigate claims contained in the Reports, titled: “Ocean Of Innocent Blood Flowing In Eastern Nigeria” and “Human Rights Made In Nigeria.”
The coalition's statement was jointly signed by Mazi Luke Nwannunnu, (Coordinator), Prof Justin Akujieze; Reverend Father Ignatius, Nze Amadiebube Mbama, Chief John (Ugonna) Gregg (American), Mr. Bernhard Waner (Swiss), Dr Ahamefule, Festus as well as Mazi Oluchi Ibe, Mazi Udeh Christian Iwuagwu, and Dr James Achike.
The reports by Intersociety had chronicled a catalogue of the armed state actor and armed non state actor atrocities in the East within the period under review, during which the "Nigerian Security Forces, NSFs, unlawfully killed 32,300 defenseless citizens including the abducted and disappeared; tortured and bodily lacerated tens of thousands; burned down or razed 6000 civilian homes valued at over N450billion; raided 300 defenseless Igbo communities; sacked their 180,000 inhabitants; and frightened and forced over 1million others to flee their homes.
“We hereby call on the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions; the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Religious Freedom; the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders; the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of the Internally Displaced People; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Arrest and Detention; the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing (anti-Domicide); the UN Special Rapporteur on Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Office; the UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, New York, USAand the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC to urgently intervene, investigate and identify and hold armed state actor and armed non-state actor perpetrators involved accountable and sanction those public office holders, aiding, abetting and sponsoring them appropriately.
“We also urge the incoming Trump Administration in the United States to adopt the Reports as a working document on the assessment of Nigeria’s human rights records and the USA’s future international development partnership with the Government of Nigeria. The incoming Donald Administration is particularly called upon to ensure that the Government of Nigeria is compelled to respect the International Freedom of Worship or Belief, or risk being enlisted in the “Country Of Particular Concern, CPC,” under “the International Religious Freedom Act, IRFA, of 1998.
“In line with the Intersociety’s seventy-six recommendations contained in its Special Reports, we are calling on Nigeria’s International Development Partners including Member-States of EU, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Canada to: 1. Critically study the Reports and have them reflected in future development and defense, security and safety supports or aids as well as supports for promotion of democracy, rule of law, human rights and humanitarian assistance to Government of Nigeria and ensure that such supports or aids are not channeled into “instruments of violence or state terror and persecution” against defenseless members of the Eastern civilian population and their propertiesparticularly on the grounds of faith or religion and ethnicity,”
The international activists in the statement, urged the petitioned groups “to particularly ensure that such development assistance and human rights and humanitarian supports amounting to billions of dollars yearly are not channeled into extrajudicial killings, abductions, torture and other cruel treatments, enforced disappearances, civilian house burnings, false labeling, class criminalization, ethnoreligious profiling and persecution, prosecutorial vindictiveness and hearsay conclusions, etc., targeted at defense Eastern civilian population and their defenseless properties. The Government of Nigeria shall be compelled to frontally address pandemic and endemic corruption in the country’s security (military, police and secret police) sector and digitalize law enforcement operations including preventive, detective, investigative policing and crime detection; all of which have become a modern trend around the world for more than ten years. It must further be noted that “Digital Policing/Security” has become the speediest way by which struggling countries have leveled up with advanced countries because it is quantitative, qualitative, cheaper, available, avoidable, less corrupt, human rights and rule of law friendly and importable or exportable.”
Intersociety had claims in the Reports that during the period covered by its painstaking investigations, “Government-linked and non-Government linked armed non state actors killed over 14,500 defenceless citizens, abducted over 65,000 others as well as forced an estimated 55,000 of them to pay ransoms estimated at over N500 billion and another N50 billion realized from sold millennium cars seized from the abducted victims; and razed or burnt down civilian properties valued at over N60 billion. It was further noted in the reports that the killings, abductions and destructions were aided by "biased NSFs to influx and proliferate estimated 2.7m illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons across Eastern Nigeria”.
The Special Reports further “catalogued and exposed massive arbitrary arrests, perpetual detentions arising from un-investigated and un-triable phantom allegations, kangaroo arraignments, late night abduction and face-bagging of unarmed Igbo civilians to secret military detention facilities in northern Nigeria, torture and bodily lacerations, open killings, secret, extralegal and extra jus executions, innumerable cases of enforced disappearances and the victims’ dead bodies’ criminal interments; perpetual concealment of the arrested and abducted citizens’ whereabouts and denial of access to their families, lawyers and physicians; invasion and wanton destruction of civilian dwelling houses; indiscriminate resort to false labeling, mass criminalisation, class stigmatisation, ethnoreligious profiling, hate and discriminatory policing and soldiers, selective and discriminatory law enforcements and their operations, flagrant resort to prosecutorial vindictiveness and hearsay conclusions, unchecked and untamed military and police roadblock and barrack-extortions and other corrupt practices including monetization and commercialization of criminal investigations and prosecutions and crime detections and controls, etc.; all of which had arisen from the military siege and terror in Eastern Nigeria since August 30, 2015 or past nine years and four months-using “IPOB/ESN/Biafra Terrorism” as a pretext.”
Furthermore, according to the reports: “(1)out of every 15 citizens accused of being “seriously involved in Biafra/ESN/IPOB Terrorism” in the South-East, fourteen are most likely to be innocent or falsely labeled (note that no law in Nigeria or any part thereof permits security personnel or any of them to kill unarmed citizens under the use of force rule and proportionality of same); (2) out of every 15 citizens arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial in connection with the above spurious charges," 14 are most likely to have been arbitrarily arrested and detained outside the law without trial; (3) out of every 15 persons killed in the open by the military or police crack squads in connection with the same, 13 are most likely to be defenceless and unarmed; (4) out of every 15 unarmed citizens arrested alive, detained and tortured or starved to death in detention over the above, the same number 15 are most likely to be defenceless, innocent and unarmed.
“We also urge the incoming Trump Administration in the United States to adopt the Reports as a working document on the assessment of Nigeria’s human rights records and the USA’s future international development partnership with the Government of Nigeria. The incoming Donald Administration is particularly called upon to ensure that the Government of Nigeria is compelled to respect the International Freedom of Worship or Belief, or risk being enlisted in the “Country Of Particular Concern, CPC,” under “the International Religious Freedom Act, IRFA, of 1998.
“In line with the Intersociety’s seventy-six recommendations contained in its Special Reports, we are calling on Nigeria’s International Development Partners including Member-States of EU, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Canada to: 1. Critically study the Reports and have them reflected in future development and defense, security and safety supports or aids as well as supports for promotion of democracy, rule of law, human rights and humanitarian assistance to Government of Nigeria and ensure that such supports or aids are not channeled into “instruments of violence or state terror and persecution” against defenseless members of the Eastern civilian population and their propertiesparticularly on the grounds of faith or religion and ethnicity,”
The international activists in the statement, urged the petitioned groups “to particularly ensure that such development assistance and human rights and humanitarian supports amounting to billions of dollars yearly are not channeled into extrajudicial killings, abductions, torture and other cruel treatments, enforced disappearances, civilian house burnings, false labeling, class criminalization, ethnoreligious profiling and persecution, prosecutorial vindictiveness and hearsay conclusions, etc., targeted at defense Eastern civilian population and their defenseless properties. The Government of Nigeria shall be compelled to frontally address pandemic and endemic corruption in the country’s security (military, police and secret police) sector and digitalize law enforcement operations including preventive, detective, investigative policing and crime detection; all of which have become a modern trend around the world for more than ten years. It must further be noted that “Digital Policing/Security” has become the speediest way by which struggling countries have leveled up with advanced countries because it is quantitative, qualitative, cheaper, available, avoidable, less corrupt, human rights and rule of law friendly and importable or exportable.”
Intersociety had claims in the Reports that during the period covered by its painstaking investigations, “Government-linked and non-Government linked armed non state actors killed over 14,500 defenceless citizens, abducted over 65,000 others as well as forced an estimated 55,000 of them to pay ransoms estimated at over N500 billion and another N50 billion realized from sold millennium cars seized from the abducted victims; and razed or burnt down civilian properties valued at over N60 billion. It was further noted in the reports that the killings, abductions and destructions were aided by "biased NSFs to influx and proliferate estimated 2.7m illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons across Eastern Nigeria”.
The Special Reports further “catalogued and exposed massive arbitrary arrests, perpetual detentions arising from un-investigated and un-triable phantom allegations, kangaroo arraignments, late night abduction and face-bagging of unarmed Igbo civilians to secret military detention facilities in northern Nigeria, torture and bodily lacerations, open killings, secret, extralegal and extra jus executions, innumerable cases of enforced disappearances and the victims’ dead bodies’ criminal interments; perpetual concealment of the arrested and abducted citizens’ whereabouts and denial of access to their families, lawyers and physicians; invasion and wanton destruction of civilian dwelling houses; indiscriminate resort to false labeling, mass criminalisation, class stigmatisation, ethnoreligious profiling, hate and discriminatory policing and soldiers, selective and discriminatory law enforcements and their operations, flagrant resort to prosecutorial vindictiveness and hearsay conclusions, unchecked and untamed military and police roadblock and barrack-extortions and other corrupt practices including monetization and commercialization of criminal investigations and prosecutions and crime detections and controls, etc.; all of which had arisen from the military siege and terror in Eastern Nigeria since August 30, 2015 or past nine years and four months-using “IPOB/ESN/Biafra Terrorism” as a pretext.”
Furthermore, according to the reports: “(1)out of every 15 citizens accused of being “seriously involved in Biafra/ESN/IPOB Terrorism” in the South-East, fourteen are most likely to be innocent or falsely labeled (note that no law in Nigeria or any part thereof permits security personnel or any of them to kill unarmed citizens under the use of force rule and proportionality of same); (2) out of every 15 citizens arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial in connection with the above spurious charges," 14 are most likely to have been arbitrarily arrested and detained outside the law without trial; (3) out of every 15 persons killed in the open by the military or police crack squads in connection with the same, 13 are most likely to be defenceless and unarmed; (4) out of every 15 unarmed citizens arrested alive, detained and tortured or starved to death in detention over the above, the same number 15 are most likely to be defenceless, innocent and unarmed.
(5) Out of every fifteen unarmed citizens abducted outside their family knowledge and official records by soldiers or military personnel over “Biafra/IPOB/ESN Terrorism,” 14 are most likely not going to come back alive and; if arrested by DSS and their likes, and run the high risk of being tortured and killed in custody; (6) out of every fifteen unarmed citizens arrested by police crack squads over the above, seven run the high risk of not returning to their families alive; (7) out of every fifteen civilian houses or homes burned down or wantonly destroyed by military personnel or police crack squads, the same number (fifteen) are most likely not linked to ‘military necessity’; (8) out of every fifteen criminal allegations such as “involvement in ESN/Biafra/IPOB terrorism”; levelled against members of indigenous South-East and Igbo South-South civilian population, 14 most likely do not to have anything in connection with the so called “ESN/Biafra/IPOB-terrorism” or linked to ‘military matters or necessity. All the above is in addition to the fact that 95% of police or military or spy police-issued security intelligence information and law enforcement operations’ reports in the South-East and the South-South are highly questionable and most likely to be concocted or twisted or falsified.”
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