82 women are waiting for execution in Nigerian prisons – Report

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According to the international rights organization Avocats Sans Frontieres (ASF) France, there are currently 82 Nigerian women on death row in different penal facilities throughout the country.

This was said on Wednesday at a Capacity-building Session on Mainstreaming Gender Perspective in the Use of the Death Penalty in Abuja by Angela Uzoma-Iwuchukwu, Country Director of ASF France in Nigeria.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), as the World Women’s Rights Organization commemorates the 16 Days of Activism, a two-day workshop is being held to support the lives of female death row detainees.

According to Uzoma-Iwuchukwu, the number represented one of the greatest concentrations of female death row inmates in sub-Saharan Africa.

“We strongly believe that these women, who have often been neglected, forgotten, because they are behind bars and on death row, 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 said that “a lot of these women are victims of domestic violence and 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 claims that in reality, we witness more acts of violence and systemic discrimination against them.

“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.

“A lot of them are unable to pay the services of a lawyer and therefore we know, as a capital defence lawyer, I know that the quality of legal defence that you have would indeed determine whether you will end up on death row or not.

“And a lot of these women, because of poverty, because of their socioeconomic status, are unable to afford the services of lawyers to ably represent them.

“So this is a core issue for us as ASF France, also known as Lawyers Without Borders France,” she added.

The country director gave the example of a young woman (name withheld) in Katsina State who had an unwed pregnancy and was given a death by stoning sentence under Sharia law.

She claimed that the woman’s sentence was overturned at the Court of Appeal thanks to ASF France’s assistance.

“The only evidence they got against her was that she got pregnant out of wedlock but they never asked who got her pregnant,” she said.

As a result, Uzoma-Iwuchukwu requested a delay on the death row women’s execution.

“Secondly, women should be recognised as victims, especially when they are going through the death penalty in cases where they have been survivors of gender-based violence.

“It should be a mitigating factor in considering the penalty that will be handed down to them,” she said.

According to Dr. Chioma Kanu, Executive Director of the Mothers and Marginalized Advocacy Center, behind every prisoner is a weeping mother, a wife, a daughter, or a sister whose livelihood is impacted.

She claims that a fresh cycle of grief is created when the state executes a young person who was denied a fair trial.

“Be not deceived, not every death row inmate is a criminal.

“Some are convicted based on confessions obtained under police torture, some inmates languish for decades simply because administrative files went missing.

“Some cannot afford legal representatives.

“Remember, we can release an innocent prisoner but we cannot wake the dead,” she said.

We want security for our families and justice for the victims, she said. (NAN)

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