On Monday, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings, Agnes Callamard, stressed the need for urgent action by the Nigerian authorities to end violence.
“Nigeria needs urgent action to end the pressure cooker of violence which is ending thousands of lives,” she said.
In latest months, the nation has been hit with its citizens ‘ fatalities primarily by increasing crime, community conflicts, and insurgency.
The official said the failure of Nigeria to address problems such as “as internal conflict and lack of accountability patterns” will allow them to spread across the sub-region owing to the significant position of the nation on the continent.
Based on her inquiry of arbitrary murders in Nigeria, she published her present results “are not too different from that of her predecessor, Philip Alston who wrote his in 2006.”
“In 15 years, far more progresses should have taken place for a country such as Nigeria, which is a middle income country,” she said.
She added that many of the results of her predecessor are still highly important.
She said Mr Alston reported that there were issues with (police) inquiry, coroner investigations, prosecution, courts and imprisonment in Nigeria (in 2006).
In Nigerian organizations, Ms Callamard emphasized the need for accountability, forensic and scientific investigations.
During one of the IMN processions that took place in Abuja in July, she cited the killings of a Deputy Police Commissioner and a journalist.
Despite the assumption that the IMN might have been responsible for their deaths, she said, “this assumption did not meet international investigation standards”.
She said, “there is no demonstration of that conclusion, which is very problematic, it is not meeting international standards in what an investigation should be like.”
Accountability according to her “means involvement of the victims, truth telling, creating a safe space where victims can share and talk about what happened to them.”
“It is not a closed process where the only actors are the alleged perpetrators and the state.”
The government was encouraged to invest in the rule of law and to “make it part and parcel of Nigeria’s success story”.