Civil rights advocacy group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has condemned the Executive Secretary of the National Human Rights commission (NHRC), Mr. Anthony Ojukwu, for speaking against the decision of the Kaduna State Government to enforce chemical castration of rapists.

HURIWA in a statement on Monday by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Affairs Director Miss Zainab Yusuf, said the new law by the Kaduna State legislative house should be made a national law.

The rights group said it was “unimaginable that a human rights commission set up to defend rape victims is canvassing soft landing for vicious rapists and sex offenders.”

HURIWA said this “tendency to speak for sex offenders by the National Human Rights commission in a season of epidemic of sexual violations of kids by adult predatory brutes should be condemned in its totality.”

The statement reads in part: “For the avoidance of doubts and to clear any ambiguity, HURIWA BACKS the call and the law bringing into being the chemical castration of rapists. We hereby RESTATE our earlier position sent to the National Assembly thus; ‘In Nigeria rape is unlawful carnal knowledge of a female by a male. It could be non-consensual sex with an adult female or carnal knowledge of a female child or minor. On the other hand Chemical castration is the use of anaphrodisiac drugs to lower sexual drive. It does not involve removing a person’s testicles like surgical castration but only the use of drugs delivered by injection to render the testicles irrelevant.”

HURIWAcondemned “the haste by the National Human Rights commission to speak for criminal rapists just as we strongly recommend the implementation of chemical castration of rapists as a punishment to be created by law and once this is done by way of a passage into law, It cannot be erroneously presumed as torture just the same way that capital punishment is permitted for capital offences.”