Nigeria: Nailing the Perpetrators of Violence

IRIN (UN)

17 May 2011

Nigeria: Nailing the Perpetrators of Violence

Kano — Following post-election violence in which an estimated 800 people were killed and 65,000 displaced, according to Human Rights Watch, state prosecutors need to follow through on arrests to try perpetrators and seek justice, rather than initiating new commissions of inquiry that will go nowhere, say civil society and human rights groups.

"These crimes were state-level crimes - a federal-level inquiry is useless," said Innocent Chukwuma, director of the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN) in Lagos.

According to Chukwuma, the governor of Bauchi State in the north recently announced that 600 people involved in violence there had been arrested. "If you have arrested this many, why set up an investigative panel - the next stage is to take them to court and try them," he told IRIN.