Amnesty International (AI) has begun training individuals and organisations in northern Nigeria on detecting and reporting human rights violations.
The first leg of the training, supported by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), held in Damaturu, Yobe State, and was attended by participants from states in the northeast including Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Gombe and Bauchi.
The training also had participants from Plateau State in the north-central sub-region.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recently disclosed that it received 1,701,519 complaints about rights violations in 2021.
Amnesty International has recorded human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, enforced disappearances, violence against women and girls, restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly in Nigeria.
The two-day training had participants learn how to identify generic human rights issues in the northern region of the country and proffer ways of mitigating such practices.
The Training Coordinator, Bash Olasupo, said the need for civil societies to engage people in authority, especially the security agents and how to handle people decently, is important to change the narrative and the culture of silence among the people at the community level.
He noted that the rights of the people in democratic societies and what they must enjoy from the government cannot be negotiated.
‘With the coming of democracy, the expectation had been that the civic space will open up and civil society organisations will be able to occupy the space and advocate more for the protection of human rights and for the dividends of democracy, etc for the people’, he said.
‘Unfortunately, the insecurity in the northern part of the country came and so that space, even if it was created, there was no attention about trying to occupy that space and along the line, the policymakers were also concentrating on trying to manage the violent conflict orchestrated by the protracted insurgency also have been coming up with policies and statement that ordinarily were meant to protect the citizen’.
The training will continue with participants from other northern states.
Photo source: CFR
