Ex-UN Envoy Faults Senate’s Plan to Impose Death Penalty for Kidnappers

•Says proposal breaches ICCPR standards

Wale Igbintade

Professor Uchenna Emelonye, a distinguished human rights scholar at Bournemouth University, UK, and former United Nations Senior Human Rights Envoy, has condemned the Nigerian Senate’s move to amend the Anti-Terrorism (Prevention) Act to prescribe the death penalty for kidnapping, warning that the proposal breaches Nigeria’s international human rights obligations and undermines global standards on capital punishment.

Prof. Emelonye explained that the amendment is inconsistent with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Nigeria ratified in 1993, and with the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR—the leading global instrument advocating for the abolition of the death penalty.

Although Nigeria has yet to ratify the Optional Protocol, he stressed that the country is still bound by the ICCPR’s strict limitations on the use of capital punishment.

“Expanding the death penalty is a regressive, ineffective, and legally questionable response to kidnapping,” he said. “This amendment places Nigeria in direct conflict with international human rights jurisprudence and threatens to reverse decades of global progress toward ending capital punishment.”

Arguing that the death penalty does not deter crime, Prof. Emelonye stated that there is no credible evidence anywhere in the world that capital punishment reduces kidnapping or violent offences.

“Nigeria cannot hope to deter crime through executions. What is needed is investment in policing, intelligence gathering, and comprehensive justice-sector reforms, not a return to punitive excesses.”

He warned that Nigeria’s criminal justice system suffers from high “error rates,” rooted in torture-induced confessions, inadequate investigations, and limited access to competent legal representation.

Introducing or expanding capital punishment under such conditions, he said, heightens the risk of wrongful executions and irreversible miscarriages of justice, contrary to the ICCPR’s due-process protections.

“The Senate’s proposal would take Nigeria backwards, aligning it with retentionist states that still entrench capital punishment, rather than with the growing global consensus favouring human-rights-based justice systems,” he added.

Emelonye also noted that several African countries, such as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, and the Central African Republic, have abolished the death penalty without experiencing higher rates of kidnapping or violent crime.

This, he argued, proves that abolition does not embolden criminals and that capital punishment offers no real deterrent effect.

He urged members of the National Assembly to reconsider the amendment and instead adopt rights-centred, evidence-based approaches to tackling kidnapping.

These, he suggested, should include enhanced community policing, targeted socio-economic interventions, strengthened criminal-justice institutions, and firm measures to curb the proliferation of small arms and light weapons that continue to fuel insecurity nationwide.