An international non-governmental organisation, Avocats Sans Frontieres (ASF) France has revealed that no fewer than 82 female Nigerians are currently on death row in various correctional centres across the country even as it advocated for gender perspective in application of death penalty.
The advocacy was made at the two-day workshop organised by ASF to champion the course of the female inmates who are on death row as the World Women’s Rights Organisation celebrates in Abuja the 16 Days Advocacy on Gender Based Violence.
At the workshop themed: “Capacity-building Session on Mainstreaming Gender Perspective in the Use of the Death Penalty” the Country Director, ASF France in Nigeria, Angela Uzoma-Iwuchukwu said the statistics showed that the situation in Nigeria is the highest in sub-Saharan Africa, with those on death row somehow neglected and forgotted.
Uzoma-Iwuchukwu further said: “We strongly believe that these women, who have often been neglected, forgotten, because they are behind bars and on death row need a voice, we have decided to raise their voices and their peculiar circumstances.
“And this is because there are gender issues around the application of the capital punishment. It is often projected as being neutral, but the death penalty is not neutral.
“There are gender biases all across the criminal justice system, starting from the point of arrest, conviction and even incarceration of women who are facing the death penalty,” she said.
She added that “a lot of these women are victims of domestic violence who often when they react and it leads to maybe homicide cases, the criminal justice system fails to recognise them as victims as they go through the justice system.”
She went on to say, what we see in practice in Nigeria is that women are subjected to further brutality and gender biases within the set-up.
She said: “And we argue that these women are in fact convicted and tried for more than their crimes.
“They are tried for more than the crimes that they have committed. They are tried for being women who dared to commit crimes.
“And this is the gender bias, some of the gender bias that we see. There are several other issues that pertain to women and we see that they are not in any way taken into account.
“Now a lot of these women, we see issues around poverty, cross-cutting issues around poverty and how this affects women.”
In the same vein, the Founder and Chief Facilitator, Edeika Trauma Care Centre and Equity Advocates, Mrs. Ene Ede, emphatically kicked against Death Penalty in all forms. She believed life is sacred.
She said: “Anything that has to do with taking life is of utmost important to God, to humanity, to nature and to our country because, it is about deflection of human resources, it is about grieving, it is about injustice because most of the time you find element of injustice embedded in this life sentencing. So it is very problematic. If we look at it with another eye, the better for us. It is not something we should be in hurry to do.
“Therefore, it will be better to abolish death penalty in Nigeria. That is not to say we want to encourage criminality, even with the law in place there is escalation of criminality. We need to look at the justice system again with human eye, with empathy, with patriotism, because it is citizens and human beings they are dealing with and not animals”
Ene said life is too delicate to be toy with, adding that we should look at the area of the law that makes us vulnerable, that the level of its vulnerabilities is too high.
