Nigeria said on Monday that it was looking for ways to ”decongest” the death row sections of its jails, where 458 prisoners are awaiting execution, some of them for more than 20 years.
”The president has set up a committee under the chairmanship of the justice minister, to assess all these cases and see what final decision we will take on it,” Internal Affairs Minister Iyorcha Ayu said after meeting President Olusegun Obasanjo.
”Today is actually a preliminary meeting to consider these cases that remain in spite of the effort to reform the justice system in the country, and secondly to make sure that the prisons are decongested and made more habitable,” he said.
The minister did not say whether the programme would involve an accelerated programme of hangings for death row inmates, or whether more capital convictions would be commuted to prison terms.
Nigeria has come under fire from local and international human rights organisations for allowing its 40 000 inmates to languish in underfunded prisons, many of whom wait years behind bars for their trial or appeal.
Around half of all prisoners are thought to be on remand without ever having been convicted.
According to Amnesty International, which campaigns against the death penalty, at least 33 Nigerians have been sentenced to death since 1999, for crimes ranging from armed robbery to murder.
In the north of the country in Nigeria’s 12 mainly Muslim states, Islamic Sharia law holds sway and several people have been sentenced to be stoned to death for sexual offences, including adultery, rape and sodomy. – Sapa-AFP