Human Rights Group Petitions ICC Over Boko Haram’s Unending Killings

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News Thursday, March 6th, 2014

Ayo Balogun, Lagos

Human rights group, Youth and Conflict Resolution Initiatives (YCRI) has petitioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) to intervene in the unending killing of innocent Nigerians and destruction of valuable properties by the Boko Haram.

According to YCRI in a letter by its Director, International Relations, Comrade Efemena Agadama to the Chief Prosecutor, ICC, Mrs. Fatou Bensouda, the massacre of innocent Nigerians by the Boko Haram is simply a genocide.

The group stated that Boko Haram perpetrated genocide by slitting of throats of innocent children, abducting young girls for sex slaves, bombing markets, slaughtering innocent people in places of worship, axing defenseless men to death, drowning young boys in rivers, burning down whole settlements while innocent children and women cry for help, massacring teachers and medical personnel and destroying entire farmlands.

“These are brutal crimes and frontal violations of the Part 2, Articles 5, 6, 7, and 8 of the Rome statue setting the ICC. It’s genocide so the ICC urgently needs to break its silence, request the names of the sponsors of Boko Haram and extradite them for trial to end the cruel and ongoing slaughtering of innocent children whose only crime is yearning for basic education, which is their inalienable right,” it stated.

He body lamented the inability of the Nigerian government to arrest and prosecute a single sponsor of the sect even when some lawmakers and state government officials from those areas had been evidently identified of having questionable contacts and support for the sect.

“Boko Haram has sponsors. The sponsors are not ghosts; therefore, we call on the International Criminal Court to help unmask these sponsors of Boko Haram for trial at The Hague,’ it said.

The body added that the continuous, deliberate and systematic massacre of entire villages and settlements because of Boko Haram’s religion or cultural group is raw genocide that should not be allowed to go unchallenged for so long because of politics in Nigeria.