By Esther Onyegbula

Professor Uchenna Emelonye, a human rights scholar at Bournemouth University, UK, has faulted the Senate’s proposal to broaden the death penalty under the Anti-Terrorism (Prevention) Act, warning that the move breaches Nigeria’s international human rights obligations and poses grave risks to justice administration.

The Senate is seeking to amend the Act to impose capital punishment for kidnapping and related offences. But Prof. Emelonye, a former United Nations Senior Human Rights Envoy, said the plan contradicts global standards and places Nigeria on a “dangerous regression path.”

He said the amendment conflicts with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Nigeria ratified in 1993, and undermines the principles of the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, the primary global instrument advocating for the abolition of capital punishment. While Nigeria has not ratified the Optional Protocol, he stressed that the country remains bound by the ICCPR’s restrictive provisions on the use of the death penalty.

“Expanding the death penalty is a regressive, ineffective and legally questionable response to kidnapping,” Emelonye 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.”

He argued that there is no credible evidence linking capital punishment with a reduction in kidnapping or violent crime, noting that “Nigeria cannot hope to deter crime through executions.” According to him, meaningful progress requires investment in policing, intelligence gathering and reforms across the justice sector, not harsher punishments.

Emelonye also raised concerns over what he described as Nigeria’s persistently high “error rates” in criminal prosecutions, citing torture-induced confessions, poor investigative capacity and limited access to legal representation. Expanding capital punishment under these conditions, he warned, heightens the risk of wrongful executions in violation of ICCPR due-process guarantees.

“The Senate proposal to reintroduce death penalty into our body of laws would set Nigeria’s trajectory backwards and place it among retentionist jurisdictions where capital punishment remains entrenched, rather than aligning with the growing global abolitionist consensus,” he said.

He noted that African countries that have abolished the death penalty—among them Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia and the Central African Republic—have not witnessed spikes in kidnapping, further debunking claims that abolition fuels violent crime.

Emelonye urged the National Assembly to reconsider the amendment and instead adopt rights-centric, evidence-based measures to combat kidnapping. These, he said, should include enhanced community policing, targeted socio-economic interventions, strengthened criminal-justice institutions and robust action to curb the proliferation of small arms driving insecurity nationwide.