Nigeria's justice system 'broken'
2008-02-26 08:00
Abuja - Amnesty International says on that a majority of the tens of thousands of prisoners in Nigeria's jails haven't been convicted of a crime, with inmates languishing for years awaiting trial in cramped and squalid conditions.
The criminal justice system in Africa's most-populous nation was a "conveyer belt of injustice, from beginning to end", Amnesty said in releasing a new report on Nigeria's prisons.
London-based Amnesty said it shared its findings with Nigeria's federal government, with the interior ministry replying: "The Nigerian government is not unaware of most of the observations ... The various ongoing reform initiatives are intended to provide short, medium and long-term solutions to most of the nagging problems."
Various government commissions had recommended widespread reforms for Nigeria's criminal justice system, but Amnesty said they hadn't been acted upon.
Govt 'not complying with obligations'
Amnesty found that at least 65% of Nigeria's 40 000 prisoners hadn't been convicted of the crime for which they're being detained, with some inmates waiting up to a decade for the outcome of a trial.
"The Nigerian government is simply not complying with national and international obligations when it comes to the criminal justice system and must begin to do so seriously and urgently," Amnesty's Aster van Kregten said in a statement announcing the release of its 50-page report.
Most prisoners were too poor to afford legal representation and only about 15% of them had private lawyers. Meantime, only 91 lawyers were available for free counsel in the country, Amnesty said. Nigeria had 140 million people, according to government census figures.
"The conditions Amnesty International saw and the stories we heard from inmates are a national scandal."
$400bn 'missing' from govt
Due to poverty, criminality and corruption were major problems in Nigeria. The vast majority of the population struggled to survive despite the government's massive earnings from its oil industry, Africa's biggest.
At least $400bn was missing from Nigeria's government coffers since the discovery of oil in the mid-1960s, the government's own anti-graft agency said.
Nigerian authorities had long acknowledged problems with police who had beaten or killed suspects, overcrowded and dingy jails, and a sluggish and often-corrupt court system.
Nigerians who said they were innocent said they had been caught up in police dragnets and thrown in jail, where many were beaten to extract phony confessions. Amnesties for long-held prisoners had been granted periodically over the years.
Amnesty said prison conditions varied in the 10 prisons it visited last year, but the report characterised as "appalling" the overall state of the jails.
It said 80% of Nigeria's 144 prisons were built before 1950 - predating Nigeria's 1960 independence from Britain.
- AP