Avocats Sans Frontieres (ASF) France, an international rights organisation, says no fewer than 82 female Nigerians are currently on death row in various correctional centres across Nigeria.
Angela Uzoma-Iwuchukwu, the Country Director, ASF France in Nigeria, stated this on Wednesday at a capacity-building session on Mainstreaming Gender Perspective in the Use of the Death Penalty in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the two-day workshop is organised to champion the cause of the female inmates who are on death row as the World Women’s Rights Organisation celebrates the 16 Days of Activism.
Uzoma-Iwuchukwu said the figure accounted for one of the highest number of women on death row in the 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.”
According to her, what we see in practice is that they are subjected to further violence, further discrimination within the system.
“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 cited a case of a young woman (name withheld) in Katsina State who was sentenced to death by stoning under the Sharia law, for having pregnancy out of wedlock.
She said through the intervention of ASF France, the woman’s sentence was upturned at the Court of Appeal.
“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.
Uzoma-Iwuchukwu, therefore, sought a moratorium on execution for the women on death row.
“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.
The Executive Director of Mothers And Marginalised Advocacy Centre, Dr Chioma Kanu, said behind every inmate is a mother who cries or a wife, or daughter, or sister whose livelihood is affected.
According to her, when the state executes a young man or woman who didn’t have a fair trial, it creates a new circle of grief.
“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.
According to her, “we want justice for victims and security for our families.”
