‘Nigerian Prisons Holding Over 25,000 Awaiting-Trial Inmates’

Posted by admin Headlines Saturday, July 16th, 2011

The Nigerian Prisons Service has admitted to having 40,189 prisoners under its custody with 64 per cent or 25,00 inmates awaiting trial. Meanwhile, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mike Ahamba has described the imprisonment of the 25,000 crime suspects who are are awaiting trial as unconstitutional as they are yet to be convicted. Assistant comptroller of prisons and public relations officer of the service Kayode Odeyemi, for his part, said that all detainees are being legally held because the courts have asked them to do so and that the only solution was the speedy trial of the suspects.

Ahamba said that there are lapses in the justice system and the constitution does allow for the Prison Service to hold suspects awaiting trial indefinitely. Investigations by LEADERSHIP SUNDAY found that some have been languishing in jail for years in some 268 prisons across the country because the system is incapable of trying them. Odeyemi said, “The issue is this: there a stop guide between the court and the prison.If the court makes an order asking for someone to be remanded, the Prisons has no choice but to obey and keep the person in custody. The question now is whether that person knows his/her right to press for further hearing on his case.” Ahamba also said: “Our legal institution does not have a structure on ground that voluntarily assists individuals to push this cause.”

Odeyemi agreed that detainees awaiting trial were the major reason why prisons in urban areas are congested. He said most of them are in 12-14 prisons in Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt and Calabar but cannot be moved to prisons in rural areas that are not congested because they have to appear in court. The 2011 Amnesty International report on Nigeria released earlier in May, however, contends there are close to 48,000 prisoners in the country with some 70 per cent of them, that is 33,000, awaiting trial. The Amnesty report partly reads: “Seventy per cent of Nigeria’s nearly 48,000 prison inmates were pre-trial detainees. Many had been held for years awaiting trial in appalling conditions. Few could afford a lawyer and the government-funded Legal Aid Council had only 122 lawyers for the whole country.”

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