A pro-democracy Non-Governmental Organisation, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, has taken exception to the sweeping indictments of war crime made against Nigeria’s erstwhile Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Azubuike Ihejerika; the incumbent, Lieytenant General Kenneth Minimah; the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh; and his predecessor, Admiral Ola Sa’ad Ibrahim.
The rights group also faulted the conclusions drawn by the London-based Amnesty International on the guilt or otherwise of the above mentioned officers of the Nigerian military.
HURIWA said in its considered thinking, those conclusions were nebulous and fundamentally defective.
It said based on the well known doctrine of Superior/Command Responsibility, which rules out any direct criminal liability for top level military commanders who had no knowledge or indeed not involved in directly commanding the operatives in the war front to wantonly commit war crime or violate the fundamental human rights of detainees or enemy combatants, and in this instance the armed terrorists in the North East of Nigeria.
Besides, HURIWA accused Amnesty International of indirectly harassing the newly inaugurated President Muhammadu Buhari who recently gave clear and unambiguous directives to the military to frontally confront and decimate and degrade the armed Islamists in the North East of Nigeria who are still wrecking havoc and committing large scale violations of the right to life of innocent Nigerian civilians.
The rights group questioned the timing of the release of “this jaundiced report by Amnesty International at this exact period that the new government has vowed to commit more forces to militarily defeat these armed terrorists responsible for the mass killings of over 15,000 innocent Nigerians since three years now”.
The statement added: “Who is Amnesty International working for? Why is Amnesty International just releasing this report exactly at this time that the Federal Government has stated a renewed resolve to crush Boko Haram and why is Amnesty International intervening and interjection with this one sided and substantially hear say evidence based report just few days after some suspected political sympathisers in the North under some contraption of Northern Elders had called for amnesty to be given to Boko Haram? Is it possible that elements within Boko Haram have infiltrated Amnesty International? Why is Amnesty International not exhaust local judicial and internal mechanisms before submitting this one sided report to the International Crime Court when the Rome Statutes clearly recognized the sovereign powers of local jurisdictions of nations to handle matters of alleged violations of rights of citizens during armed conflicts? Why is Amnesty International naming top Nigerian Generals for indictments for alleged offences committed by field operatives far award from Defence Headquarters when there are abundant precedence like in USA whereby soldiers who allegedly committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan were individually tried and convicted in the United States even as no American Military Generals were prosecuted for alleged offences of their subordinates? This is rascally and smacks of racism on the part of Amnesty International thereby rendering this report a hogwash and invalid.”
HURIWA added: “We know that judicial experts have clearly enunciated the doctrine of command responsibility. Command or superior responsibility is often misunderstood. First, it is not a form of objective liability whereby a superior could be held criminally responsible for crimes committed by subordinates of the accused regardless of his conduct and regardless of what his knowledge of these crimes. Nor is it a form of complicity whereby the superior is held criminally responsible for some sort of assistance that he has given to the principal perpetrators. Instead, superior responsibility is a form of responsibility for omission to act: a superior may be held criminally responsible under that doctrine where, despite his awareness of the crimes of subordinates, he culpably fails to fulfill his duties to prevent and punish these crimes.
“We agree with the conclusions of the Peace and Justice Initiative on the doctrine of command responsibility that: “commission of one or more crimes attributable to a subordinate is a pre-requisite for the application of that doctrine. In addition, the following requirements have been identified as forming part of the doctrine of superior responsibility under customary international law:
“(i) A relationship of superior-subordinate linking the accused and those who committed the underlying offences at the time of the commission of the crime;
“(ii) The knowledge on the part of the superior that his subordinates have committed or taken a culpable part in the commission of a crime or are about to do so; and
“(iii) A failure on the part of the superior to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent or to punish those crimes.”