Citizenship News
Stakeholders at a public hearing organised by the Senate Joint Committees on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters; National Security and Intelligence; and Interior on Thursday opposed the proposed amendment to “Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act”.
The one-day Public Hearing was on ‘A Bill for an Act to Amend the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act to designate kidnapping, hostage taking, and related offences as acts of terrorism to prescribe death penalty for such offences without an option of fine or alternative sentence and for related matters 2025”.
The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, former UN Envoy Uchenna Emelonye, the National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), and the Department of State Services, DSS, were among those in attendance.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), proposed that before any bill is passed into law by legislative bodies at the Federal or State level, it must first undergo and successfully pass a human rights impact assessment test.
“This means that the proposed legislation must improve the general enjoyment of the human rights of Nigerians and must be in tandem with internationally recognized human rights norms and best practices.
“This is a general examination of the above-referred bill to ensure that it complies with the highest human rights standards.”
Senator Ekong Sampson supported the definition of offence and punishment to differentiate between attempted kidnapping and those who killed in the process.
Although the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recognized the efforts of the legislature to put an end to escalating tension in the country resulting from violent crimes, mindless killings, kidnappings and religious extremism in Nigeria, it was of the view that the “Bill has serious legal, constitutional, and policy problems based on Nigerian constitutional law and criminal jurisprudence and the principles of justice which are set out here seriatim”.
The opposition to the amendment by Nigeria’s foremost legal and justice-sector institutions have formally validated and reinforced the long-standing opposition to capital punishment for kidnapping consistently advanced by Professor Uchenna Emelonye, former United Nations Human Rights Envoy and Professor of Human Rights Law at Bournemouth University, United Kingdom.
In their respective submissions before the Senate, the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the Nigerian Law Reform Commission (LRC), the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) all expressed principled and evidence-based reservations about the proposed expansion of the death penalty, particularly as a response to kidnapping and related violent crimes.
These positions align with Professor Emelonye’s publicly articulated view, advanced severally through open letters, policy briefs, media interventions, and legislative memoranda, that the death penalty does not constitute an effective deterrent to kidnapping in Nigeria and risks diverting attention from the real drivers of insecurity.
Speaking in reaction to the convergence of institutional positions on the subject matter, Professor Emelonye stated that:
“I welcome the courage and clarity demonstrated today by Nigeria’s key justice and human rights institutions. Their submissions reaffirm what empirical evidence, comparative global experience, and Nigeria’s own history clearly show — that expanding capital punishment will not stop kidnapping. What Nigeria urgently needs are institutional reforms, intelligence-led policing, effective prosecutions, border security, arms control, and victim-centred justice.”
Professor Emelonye has consistently argued that Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis is rooted not in the absence of harsh penalties, but in systemic weaknesses within policing, investigation, prosecution, and criminal justice administration, compounded by the proliferation of small arms, porous borders, poor intelligence coordination, and socio-economic vulnerabilities.
He further warned that expanding the scope of the death penalty within a criminal justice system marked by investigative gaps and a high risk of wrongful convictions creates an unacceptable risk of irreversible miscarriages of justice, while offering little measurable security benefit.
