Mrs Joy Ezeilo, is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons especially women and children. She is also the chairperson of Women Aid Collective (WACOL). In this interview, she called on states that have not passed the Child Rights Act to do so. She also called for the abolition of the death penalty. She spoke on other human rights related issues.

Excerpt:

There has been call for states of the federation that have not passed the Child Rights Act to do so. But of what benefit will the Act be, if passed, without government improving on our educational sector, given that it is only the children of the rich who get the best of it?

It is important for all the states of the federation to adopt the Child Rights Law that will recognise human rights that are of specific application to children that will reflect their need for special care and attention, their vulnerability to abuse, neglect and exploitation and the difference between their world and the world of adults.

Mrs. Joy Ezeilo,

Personally, I think a lot of reforms are on going in that sector, which if tenaciously carried out will ensure that every child irrespective of social and economic status of the parents will have access to qualitative education in the best environment possible. Our major problem in Nigeria with educational system is lack of consistency in policy and programme implementation, having required resources, financial and human to effect and sustain introduced reforms.

The debate on the abolition of death penalty has been raging. And presently, there are those who want it retained and those who want it abolished. What is your position on the debate?

I will state categorically that I belong to the abolitionist group. As far I am concerned as a human rights scholar and activist,  death penalty amounts to torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, which is prohibited in Nigeria’s constitution. The move internationally is for total abolition of death penalty beyond the prohibited grounds of not executing children and pregnant women. In fact, most jurisdictions have abolished death penalty and the list is growing every day.  The courts In Southern Africa have declared death penalty and death row phenomenon to be unconstitutional and a violation of the constitutional provision against torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The ground upon which those courts found death penalty offensive is also in our constitution,  in fact section 34 of the 1999 constitution.

The practice of detaining young people in the same facilities with adults, be it at police stations or prisons is one that should worry anybody, yet we are recording increasing cases of detention of young people with adults and the matter is made worse by the arbitrary arrest by the police of young persons. How can this trend be checked?

The Police in Nigeria obviously act excessively and abuse often times, they abuse power of arrest and detention. We have seen severally cases where young people have been arrested for no justifiable reasons except for economic exploitation by the police. If children or juvenile are arrested, the law nationally, regionally and internationally provides safeguards that will uphold the rights and safety and promote the physical and mental well -being of such children or juvenile in conflicts with the law. The goal is to ensure that children are dealt with in a manner proportionate both to their circumstances and to the offence they may have been alleged to have committed.

The well being including sense of dignity and worth of children and juvenile in conflict with the law require that they are separated from the adult and that is the standard. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice 1985 known as the Beijing Rules advocates for that. Similarly, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child reinforces that. Nationally, the Child Rights Act 2003 protects Children and Juvenile in conflict with the law and that’s the importance of advocating for all states of the federation to adopt it and protect the rights of arrested or detained persons and avoid ill-treatment of children. As a matter of fact, the law advocates for use of incarceration, detention or any deprivation of liberty as a last resort where children and juveniles are involved.

They should instead be diverted from the formal justice system and provided prompt access to legal and appropriate assistance. Whenever appropriate,  parents or legal guardian should be notified and involved at the earliest time except where this will not be in the best interests of the child.

The country’s criminal justice system is known to all as very ineffective and several committees have been set up and they have submitted their reports to government, yet, there has been no improvement. What is the way out?

We need political and economic will to effect the desired changes,  particularly implementation of recommended reforms for effective administration of the criminal justice system. We need holistic reforms in all the institutions involved;  Police, Court and the Prison. We need to build institutional capacity to sustain whatever changes we record.

I do not want to regurgitate the problem with the sector,  we all know that and several white papers have been written without much effort to operationalise and concretise those recommendations. In fact, the problem is the size of an elephant but I don’t believe that it is intractable or insurmountable.

There has been so much talk about women’s rights, but most often, even women encourage the abuse of fellow women. The practice of using young girls by the banks as marketers and its attendant consequence has been with us and from some women I spoke to, it is often their female bosses that will see nothing wrong with the impossible targets they are required to meet. What is the way out of this?

I do not believe in the conspiracy theory that women are their own worst enemy or that they are ones that encourage abuse of the women. They are not-it is the agents of socialisation; family, school and the society that have socialised men and women alike into abusing and oppressing women and young girls.

To the question that you have raised,  it is capitalism and capitalist tendencies that are the cause of sexual and economic exploitation of women and girls for commercial gains. We need regulations that will prohibit banks from exploiting vulnerable women facing livelihood challenges. The aggressive marketing and these impossible targets exposes them to physical, bodily and mental harm. They are sexually harassed and abused and many of them rarely take action or seek redress for those work place abuses for fear of losing their jobs.

At Women Aid Collective (WACOL) we have received a number of cases on sexual harassment and cruel treatment meted out to women who refuse to succumb to their harassers and it was in response of this that  we started an initiative jointly with the National Human Rights Commission to combat sexual harassment at our educational institutions and workplaces. The project is called CASH, Campaign Against Sexual Harassment and we have produced a draft policy, which we are currently using in advocacy to relevant stakeholders to adopt and implement. Nigeria is way behind other countries in terms of action in this area. We are also sensitising working class women and students on what constitute harassment and the need to take immediate action to stop that.

Child abuse is one problem the United Nation is very concerned about, but in view of the economic down-turn, in the country, most parents cannot afford to cloth, feed or pay for their children’s education and would demand the children to either hawk and do some other work to assist and often, the child ends up not going to school. How do we reconcile the failure of parents to take care of their children, simply because of poor salaries and the need to survive, which often times make them use their children for hawking or force them to work?

I pioneered the teaching of a course on women, children and the law in Nigeria and have taught this at the University of Nigeria, Faculty of Law since 1997 and one of the interesting questions that I always ask my students to debate which reflects our experiences,  concerns the issue that you have raised. I frame it that children must work in order to survive or pay their school fees and I would ask students to debate that, bearing in mind several instruments and programmes aimed at ending exploitative child labour and promoting child’s right to education internationally especially by UNICEG and ILO.

Their responses are fascinating and revealing from both sides of the divide. It is pertinent to note that Child Labour is prevalent in Nigeria and that it is a major form of child abuse. Child labour is also related to lack of access to compulsory education and to gaps in protective legislation. There is no precise definition of child labour and any attempt to define it usually present problems of whether both paid and unpaid labour should be regarded as work, bearing in mind that unremunerated jobs as in household chores can be as tedious for the child as remunerated work outside the home. Of course,  not all forms of child labour is exploitative but child labour becomes exploitative when it threatens the physical, mental, emotional or social development of children at work,  where the financial remuneration on the services in kind are less than that which would be paid to adults.

Exploitative child labour in Nigeria manifest in the form of street trading, hawking, bus conducting, working in hotels, restaurants, work in industry and agricultural farms (exceeding certain number of hours) and finally work as servants and nannies.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child and several ILO conventions protect children from exploitative child labour. The Child Rights Act provides that every child is entitled to respect for the dignity of his/her person and that no child shall be subjected to physical, mental or emotional injury, abuse, neglect or maltreatment, including sexual abuse, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, servitude, slavery, while in care of parent. Section 28 of the Act protects every child from forced or exploitative labour.

However, employment by a member of a child’s family on light work of an agricultural, horticultural or domestic character is exempted by the Act including the Labour Law. There is need to revise and enforce the existing law on street trading, which prohibits young persons from being employed at night between 10pm and 6am and also young girls from being sent out to hawk after 6.30pm and in the vicinity of barracks, dock or wharf or places where liquor is sold.

We have seen several cases of child defilement and sexual abuse and neglect due to street trading and hawking. We know that poverty is the major cause of child labour which exposes the child to physical and emotional harm. I strongly believe therefore,  that government needs to do more to assist parents. Street children are exposed to all kinds of morally bankrupt people and not surprising they often engage in truancy and delinquent behaviours, such as cheating, lying, stealing, drug abuse and prostitution. Those in school who are forced to hawk wares often perform badly at school. We must all take action to ensure that our children assume constructive and not destructive roles in the society.

You are a specialist in women rights issues. Are Nigerian women better off today?

My answer to your question is yes and no. Yes, because women are now aware of their rights and making personal and group efforts to actualize that in different spheres of life-political, economic, social and otherwise. All Nigerian women enjoy their franchise and this is constitutionally guaranteed unlike at independence where only southern women had right to vote. Women are shattering the glass ceiling everywhere and entering the so called male domain of public life, politics and business. On the other hand Nigerian women have been shortchanged in terms of according them equal rights and opportunities as their male counterpart in the political economy of the country.

Unarguably, Nigeria cannot develop as a nation if about half of its population potentials are untapped. I have always believed that when qualified and competent women have the opportunity to serve and participate in governance that they usually excel and perform creditably well and are often guided by the best interest of the family and the nation. I have always advocated that the quickest way to fast track development and put Nigeria on the path to sustainable democracy and development is to involve greater number of women- actually to have more women than men in government. It will certainly make a difference in reducing corruption and focusing on effective delivery of public goods and services. Women unlike men have different purposes for example in seeking for elective and appointive positions. Women are more service and people oriented.

The Nigeria Labour Congress has called for the creation of an Electoral Crimes Commission. Will this take care of the fraud that had marred our elections for some years now, particularly, in a society, where the incumbent will do everything within its power to win election?

I share that view too. The Electoral Crimes Commission is an idea whose time has come if we must succeed in our electoral reform system. I know it may sound superfluous to some because they will argue what then is the work of police and already existing institutions etc. But, I think the case of Nigeria is special and special situation demands special solution. It will remove that role from INEC and create opportunity for an independent and separate body that will monitor and prosecute offenders. I believe that the Electoral Reform Committee will do a good work and we should wait for their report and recommendations to begin to chart a new path for credible electoral system where everyone’s vote would count and is valued.

Recently, some fraudsters have been using the name of WACOL to defraud people. What is your reaction to this?

It is really sad how Nigerians have perfected fraud using ICT. The image of Nigeria is in shambles amongst comity of nations because of this. I was in UK recently and in the news,  I believe in the BBC and a special documentary was on Nigeria scammers/fraudsters and educating UK citizens and residents on how to avoid falling victim. It was really a long programme and I was extremely depressed as a proud Nigerian, but I know that what is being reported is true because myself and WACOL has been victim for six months running.

It started in March when we organized a meeting on CEDAW preparatory to a trip to New York in June to participate at the UN CEDAW Committee deliberations on the Status of CEDAW in Nigeria. WACOL facilitated that process that had about 150 organizations involved. So, these fraudsters started acting under the pretext of that to dupe unsuspecting Nigerians of their money under the false pretence that they will organise visa and travel tickets for them.

They opened an email account similar to WACOL instead of wacolnig they used wacolnigeria and instead of Women Aid Collective they were using WACOL for Women in Nigeria and many who got these scam mails thought it emanated from us and paid them. Of course, once we were notified about that,  we advised through email the participants and some of our networks not to pay money to anybody purportedly on our behalf, we even petitioned the IG and the EFCC but as I am speaking to you nothing has been done by these agencies to stop the fraudsters.

They are using about two UBA accounts and those accounts are still being operated and the bank cannot claim ignorance given how money comes in and disappears from that account. In fact, the UN Police in Abuja succeeded in arresting one of the ladies,  part of the gang who came to collect money in my name and as soon as the case was transferred to Police station in Garki, she got released.

So, I think a lot of agencies and institutions including NGO staff are implicated in the operations of these so called Yahoo boys.  Nigeria government need to take this serious and act fast to redeem our image. We must go after those who bring disrepute and odium to this great country as a matter of urgency,  wherever they are,  whether in the country or living outside Nigeria. I will caution that the payer should beware too. WACOL has never collected money for visa processing, travels or tickets for people.

As a matter of fact, we raised funding and sponsored some of those that attended; unfortunately, they even used the name of one of our Partners who funded us, Heinrich Boll Foundation to defraud people too.

They will start by telling people that they have space to fund them and end up asking them to pay money for visa and ticket and that they will refund them later on. In fact, one of them often impersonates me and will send text messages and emails to people that I have changed my MTN Cell phone, which I have never done since I acquired that line. They will even speak and pretend that the network is bad or that I have cold in order to convince their victims that it is my voice. From those that have complained to WACOL, we estimate money lost to these fraudsters at over twenty million naira.

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