Welcome, No Torture Bill

The outgoing House of Representatives has passed a bill criminalising torture, cruelty and inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment of offenders, or those under investigation. The bill, when signed into law, will regulate superordinate and subordinate interactions and protect criminal suspects.

The bill describes torture as an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person, for such purposes as obtaining from him or her or a third person information or a profession, and punishing him or her for an act he or she or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed. In passing the bill, the legislators argued that freedom from torture is a non-derogable right. In their opinion, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency may be invoked as justification for torture. They further argued that the bill will ensure that the rights of all persons, including suspects, detainees and prisoners, are respected at all times and that no person placed under investigation or held in custody of any person in authority shall be subjected to physical harm, force, violence, threat or intimidation, or any act that impairs his free will.

Specifically, the bill listed elements of torture to include systematic beatings, head-banging, punching, kicking, striking with rifle butts and jumping on the stomach. Others are food deprivation or forcible feeding with spoilt food, animal or human excreta or other food not normally eaten. Electric shock, cigarette burning, burning by electrically heated rods, hot oil or acid, rubbing of pepper or other chemical substances on mucous membranes, or acid or spices directly on a wound, as well as submersion of the head in water or water polluted with excrement, urine, vomit and/or blood until the brink of suffocation are listed too. Also on the list are being tied or forced to assume fixed and stressful bodily positions and sexual abuse of any kind.

We consider the provisions of this bill very timely and germane to the crusade against human rights abuses in homes where minors are tortured or even killed on allegation of possessing powers of witchcraft, where also domestic violence has sent many to their early graves, in offices where juniors are unduly harassed for mundane reasons and in security cells where all manner of inhuman methods are considered appropriate and adopted in the guise of extracting information from suspects. In the course of prosecuting the war against insurgents, the Nigerian military is having a running battle with human rights groups, local and foreign, over perceived abuses.

We are, however, concerned that the bill is silent on the penalty to be meted out to violators of this proposed law. This is very important if the bill, when passed into law, is to serve its purpose of reducing if not eradicating torture in all its forms.