Nigeria:Rights Group Backs Police on Bayelsa Security Outfit

Nigeria: Rights Group Backs Police Boss on Bayelsa Security Outfit

The Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (IHRHL) has given reasons why they are in full support of the decision of the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Hafiz Ringim, to scrap Famou-Tagbei, a special security outfit that was funded by the Bayelsa State government.

Executive Director of the group, Mr. Anyakwee Nsirimovu, told AkanimoReports in an interview on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, that the security outfit which was disbanded on Sunday September 25, was “a political terrorist squad”.

According to the human rights group, “that arbitrary, uncivilized jungle-justice security outfit, was better known in Bayelsa state as ‘Kill and Throw Away'. It was an unconstitutional, illegitimate terroristic body officially sanctioned by the executive arm of the Bayelsa state government, without any legislative backing, as a private political security outfit, that engaged and accomplished their whims and caprices in the state, outside the due process requirements of the law.

“That security outfit over time unleashed impunity - campaign of arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment and extrajudicial executions of perceived enemies of the incumbent administration and other powerful political office holders in the state”.

IHRHL said they will unequivocally continue to condemn the state government, anchored by Governor Timipre Sylva, a lawyer, on the sanctioning of such an unparallel barbarous political security outfit, whose responsibility includes the intimidation and silencing of voices of dissent, destruction of thought, expression and participation in the face of unrepentant monumental level of bad governance, extreme corruption that have made effective and efficient infrastructural development in the state a non-issue; the livelihood of the citizens decimated, thereby creating a sense of helplessness and frustration amid political office holders living like kings in the midst of incredible level of poverty at the urban and rural community levels”.

The human rights group is calling on the unsuspecting law abiding citizens of Bayelsa state to be extremely weary of their alleged “shameless exploiters and abusers of power, who are presently threatened by the immediate disbandment of their instrument of aggrandizement and suppression, and have engaged in all manners of noise-making; with a view to henceforth raising their voices against a government that is anti-people, lacked democratic credentials, transparency and accountability in their operations”.

“IHRHL wishes to categorically restate the absolute supremacy of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of government, which the aforesaid Governor Sylva’s illegitimate security out represented in Bayelsa state.

In civilized societies, citizens are meant to be ruled by regular law, and by regular law alone.

“They can only be punished by the breach of the law, nothing else. It is a fundamental principle of the rule of law that no person is above the law, and none should be punishable except for a clear breach of law, duly established in the ordinary legal manner before a court of competent jurisdiction. The establishment of operation ‘Kill and Throw-Away’ is not only an uncivilized behaviour, but a fundamental violation of the concept of the rule of law”, the group said.

Adding, the group said, “in addition to available documented evidence of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, including extrajudicial executions, calls on more families and friends of victims of the arbitrary security outfit, to come forth with more evidence and testimonies that exposes further the dark iniquities, with a view to forcing the hands of the authorities to unearth and prosecute the agents directly or indirectly responsible for the implementation of its wretched policies. A court action to seek for exemplary compensation for the victims of gross violations of human rights is an objective that cannot be wished away”.

ENDS

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