Why Death Penalty Should Be Abolished In Nigeria – Human Rights Activists

Some Human Rights activists have called on the Federal Government to consider abolishing death penalty and replacing it with life imprisonment.

The stakeholders made the call on Friday in Enugu during an awareness programme organised by two non-governmental organisations, Sant’ Egidio and Cities for Life.

The theme of the programme is on: ‘Women Sentence to Death: An Invisible Reality.’ They also asked the National and States Assemblies to remove death sentence as punishment for crimes.

The NGOs said they could do this through the amendment of the Criminal and Penal Codes as well as the Robbery and Firearm Act. The director, Cities for Life, Mrs Linda Ebeh, alleged that most of those sentenced to death were innocent.

She cited the case of a woman who was executed for killing her husband only for an autopsy to reveal that the man died of heart attack.

“Most African countries are in favour of the abolition of the death penalty. Rwanda abolished the death penalty in 2007, Gabon in 2010, Benin in 2010, Congo and Madagascar in 2015, Guinea in 2016 for ordinary crimes and 2017 for military crimes and Burkina Faso in 2018. As of today, 21 of the 55 African Union member-states have abolished death penalty for all crimes,” she said.

Ebeh said in spite of the reason often given for death penalty as a deterrent to capital offences, such offences were still thriving and thereby denying the punishment the expected deterring effect.

She urged state governments to come up with better ways to deal with criminal activities rather than imposing death sentences on citizens, as it had not solved the problem of criminality in Nigeria.

Similarly, Mr Valentine Madubuko, the Coordinator of the National Human Rights Commission in Enugu State,  noted that capital punishment was not the best way for the government to punish convicted criminals.

In his remarks, the National Responsible Community of Sant’ Egidio, Mr Henry Ezike, called on the Federal Government to abolish the death sentence as done in many other African countries.

“By the end of 2018, Nigeria’s death row of at least 2,000 inmates was the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said. Ezike described many of the death convicts as innocent or those without anyone to assist them in the judicial process of the country.

NAN

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