Human rights lawyer Femi Falana (SAN) has condemned the Nigerian police for paradimng suspects and urged the security agents to put an end to it.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria said this during a keynote address at the inauguration of the hearing of the South-West Zone Presidential Panel on the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) Reform.
Falana said the act of parading criminal suspects by the police negated the principle of fair hearing and was a breach of the suspects’ fundamental human rights.
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The lawyer said, “What the commission may want to look at is that the country is under-policed. We have less than 200,000 police that are actually policing over 200 million Nigerians because the rest of them (police) are guarding and protecting top public officers and some rogues. The Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, must take cognisance of this; some men of questionable character go about with five policemen. They are the people who are to be questioned. We need more policemen and women to police our country.”
Urging the panel to extend its work to the violations committed by other security outfits, Falana called for the cooperation of Nigerians to expose any infraction on human rights in whatever form.
The panel, headed by the Executive Secretary of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Tony Ojukwu, was expected to look into the level of rights infringement by SARS operatives across the country.
The Executive Secretary of NHRC, Ojukwu, said the reform would reshape the activities of SARS and allow probity into their operations.
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