By P. D. Pius

Human rights activist, P. D. Pius has urged Federal Government to Protect Innocent Children from false terrorism charges.

Mr. Pius in a statement on Saturday queried “I am completely lost. Why order for their detention for 3 months before bringing them to Court?”.

Read the full statement below

I am in severe pains looking at the faces of these children that charges of treason were filed against them. When I was at this tender age, the Government of H.E Olusegun Obasanjo was more interested in my education and training at Federal Government College, Wukari than prosecuting me for treason.

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I am completely lost. Why order for their detention for 3 months before bringing them to Court? How can the Federal Government prioritize charging these innocent boys for treason over their welfare, education and training? Where is our humanity please? This case has once again shown the urgent need for all Nigerians especially the National Assembly to immediately move for amendment of Terrorism Prevention Act. This law, that is supposed to be used to fight terrorist groups like Boko Haram, Bandits etc has now lost purpose and the same is turned to an instrument of terror against innocent Nigerians.

The manner in which our Police, DSS, and office of the Attorney General of the Federation are using this Terrorism Prevention Act to seek detention orders ex parte, that is without giving opportunity to the people accused to state their own side of the story is making mockery of our judiciary and justice system. As in this case, they just took the names of these children to a Judge without evidence or anything and asked that the Judge should order their detention for 60 days pending investigation. Regrettably, Judges have been granting these kinds of detention orders as a matter of course without serious interrogation of whether it is absolutely necessary to detain such suspects. Once they slap you with a terrorism charges whether or not you are guilty, whether or not the prosecution truly requires more than 5 days to conclude investigation, they will order your detention for at least 60 days without hearing you. This detention order is usually renewed endlessly under the guise of the Terrorism Prevention Act.

There are cases where accused persons have been in detention for years, some 3 years or more without any form of hearing at all under the guise of terrorism prevention act. I wonder how many years it will take to conclude an investigation of these alleged terrorism offenses. In this case that these children were accused of hoisting Russian flags as the act of terrorism in contention, I will ask you, does any serious security agency require more than 24 hours to determine whether these children hoisted this Russian flags or not? Yet, Police, DSS or AGF will go before a Federal High Judge and request for a detention order to detain them for at least 60 days to enable the security agency conclude investigation. Unfortunately, Judges will also grant this order. I was in FHC one day, a lawyer from DSS came seeking for renewal this kind of detention order, he did know when the suspect was arrested, he didn’t know when the first detention order expired, he didn’t even show the court the first detention order. He simply came to court to just collect the order without any serious attempt to justify why the suspect should be ordered to be detained behind his back without hearing his own side of the story. In fact, his main reason as a deduce is not that they needed time to conclude investigation but that the government has not set up a special court to try the suspect, so they should keep detaining him until the special court has been setup and commenced sitting where they will now file charges against him. Is this fair? Is this what we mean by fair hearing? Is this the intention of the our Constitution? Is this the intention of the Terrorism Prevention Act?
I don’t think so.

I think that the provision of the Terrorism Prevention Act giving Judges power to detain a suspect for 60 days and renewing same endlessly, all without ever seeing the suspect or hearing from him is a ridiculous provision and should immediate be amended or expunged from our laws. If you want to detain a person, bring him to court, invite his lawyer or legal aid counsel and justify why you want to detain him before he is found guilty.
It should be for rare complex cases that the prosecution truly needs time to get the evidence required. It should also come with undertaking by the prosecution that if they don’t find any evidence of guilt, they will release the suspect and pay compensation for unlawful detention. A provision be made for the prosecution to even deposit money in Court that will be used to compensate the victim if it turns out that they misled the court to detain an innocent person falsely accused of terrorism. There should be a provision for punishment of the officers of the security agency that falsely pushed a case of terrorism against an innocent person. Unless there are consequences for these wrongful acts, they will continue with impunity.

As long as we have no safeguards like this that will protect innocent Nigerians, the Police, DSS and AGF can continue to brandish false terrorism charges against innocent Nigerians and have them detained for eternity without trial and without paying for their false accusations.

I don’t have strength to talk about the 10 Million Naira bail condition given to kids who went to protest because they had no bread to eat. Why not just deny them bail?

P. D. Pius, Esq.
Abuja, Nigeria
contact@pdpiusandassociates.com