AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNS RECOMMENDATIONS TO EXECUTE JUVENILES

as the National Political Reform Conference in Nigeria prepared to reconvene in the upcoming week, Amnesty International condemned the recommendations by its Committee on Judicial and Legal Reform that juveniles should be executed when they had committed heinous crimes. The statement was supported by the Nigerian Coalition on Death Penalty Abolition (NCDPA), The Human Rights Law Service (HURILAWS), and Legal Resources Consortium.
The Committee on Judicial and Legal Reform, suggested in Chapter 10, recommendation 7 of its final report that: "capital and severe corporal punishment should be reserved only to those young persons found to have been engaged in heinous offences such as armed robbery and cultism". Amnesty International noted that the recommendation was incompatible with the legal obligations of Nigeria under Article 37(a) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 6(5) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 5(3) of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, ratified by Nigeria. Under international law, courts should not sentence to death people who were under the age of 18 at the time when the crime was committed.