Civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has charged the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia to impose immediate travel bans on the Inspector General of Police Mohammed Adamu and Police Commissioners in the 36 states of the Federation.

The rights group said the disbandment of SARS as announced by the IGP Adamu is insufficient but rather, the killers amongst the now disbanded SARS should be fished out and prosecuted for murder.

HURIWA has also demanded visa ban on the state officials of National Police Council and the Police Service Commission for their active roles or apparent inaction that instigated extra-legal execution of the citizens especially the peaceful protesters canvassing an end to police brutality and the violent killings of Nigerian youths by operatives of the SARS.

The rights group said the international community should speak up now to denounce the failures of President Muhammadu Buhari and all the relevant agencies of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, including the National Assembly to, in a very pragmatic approach, reform the entire scopes of the Nigerian policing institutions including the strengthening of all the institutional mechanisms that would prevent the continuous extra-legal execution of the citizens by the police either in the detention facilities or throughout the country with specific attention to police checkpoints and stop-and-search points of operations of the armed police operatives in Southern Nigeria.

HURIWA accused the police authority of turning police detention centres as killing fields.

HURIWA in a statement by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Affairs Director, Ms Zainab Yusuf, said the growing agitations and peaceful protests by a broad spectrum of the citizens are constitutional and legally permissible in a constitutional democracy.

HURIWA carpeted as “a bunch of misguided persons under the auspices of the Arewa Youths Consultative Forum (AYCF)” which recently faulted the on-going anti-SARS protests across the nation.

The rights group said the criticism of the nationwide protests by the group masquerading about as representing some young northerners is misplaced and mischievous and should not be taken seriously by all right thinking members of the global community.

According to HURIWA, “Nothing can be further from the truth than the calculated blackmail against millions of young Nigerians as contained in the illogical and fallacious media statement by the self acclaimed AYC’s National President, one Mr. Yerima Shettima, who on Saturday claimed that fraudsters, popularly known yahoo yahoo boys and armed robbers, thugs were behind the anti-SARS protest.”

It condemned “the deliberate misinformation by the so-called President of AYC Forum who it said has remained a ‘youth’ in perpetuity.”

The rights group said that although the national movements against police excessive deployment of brute and crude force is very widely and extensively pervasive in Southern Nigeria, it wants to remind Nigerians “who suffer loss of memory” that it was police extra-judicial killing of the founder of the Boko Haram, Muhammad Yusuf, inside the Police detention facility in Maiduguri, Borno State, 11 years ago that instigated the biggest terrorists and armed banditry attacks in the history of modern day Nigeria. This, it observed, has skyrocketed into the third largest terror networks in the entire world that have led to the killing of over 30,000 innocent souls and the turning into refugees and internally and externally displaced persons, the nearly two million children of North East of Nigeria.

“It is therefore disingenuous for anyone under any guise to issue an irresponsible and irrational statement dismissing #ENDSARS CAMPAIGNS participants as fraudsters as if to say the daughters of President Buhari and his Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbanjo, who both signed on to these widespread protests against the dangerous criminal activities of SARS are also fraudsters in the warped and toxic but illiterate imagination of Alhaji Shettima Yerima and his lazy co-travellers in the so called AYC Forum that has just unleashed the diatribes against the great Nigerian youths some of whom are creatively engaged in diverse economic activities that generate millions of dollars to the nation’s economy.”

HURIWA condemned the killings of protesters and the deployment of armed mobile police to inflict pains and brute force on Nigerians protesting the brutality.

“HURIWA has persistently asked the Nigerian State to take concrete and verifiable steps to stop the conversion of a lot of Police detention facilities in the country as execution ground whereby the Police operatives deliberately kill detainees on frivolous excuses but the Federal Government, under President Buhari does not give a hoot.

“Indeed, the current administration is a notorious use of strong armed tactics to quell civil protests since the last five years and even when in many cases, hundreds of innocent civilians are gunned down by these armed police operatives, the Federal Government has never bothered to set up judicial commissions to review these killings.

“This administration is notorious for failing to strengthen the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) which has become like a typical civil service agency in gross violations of the relevant amendments made to the legal instruments setting it up which obliges the President to ensure that a governing council is set up for the NHRC but for four years, the commission has being without a governing board and so its management can only bark but can’t bite.

“There is the need for even the Public Complaints Commission (PCC) to be empowered by legal frameworks against political interference so it can operate as an independent body but right now the PCC is simply an extension of the office of the President of the Senate who influences the membership of the body and therefore there is very little going on there.

“In the Police Service Commission the place is totally compromised and mismanaged to an extent that it has no forensic investigations department and a forensic laboratory to investigate police operatives who misapplied their weapons against Nigerians including those in conflict with the law who are deemed innocent in the eye of the law until proven guilty by the competent court of law.

“We will be writing these world leaders to step up sanctions targeting individuals in government who have failed to stop the police extra-legal execution of the citizens.”

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