Taiwo Popoola
A Federal Government visitation panel on Nigeria’s prisons across the country has said the conditions of the prisons and their inmates are still terrible and unbearable.
The visitation panel headed by a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mr Olawale Fapohunda, revealed that most inmates are languishing in prisons due to lack of legal representation and the inability of the Legal Aid Council to cope with the huge number of cases.
Submitting the report of the panel to the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, Fapohunda said that while auditing the prisons, they had interface with categories of inmates and found their conditions unpalatable.
Besides the lack of legal representation, Fapohunda said most of the inmates are suffering from ailments that the prison authorities could not bear the cost of medication.
He therefore pleaded with the AGF and the federal government to come to the rescue of the Nigerian prisons and their inmates to alleviate their poor conditions.
Fapohunda, a former Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Ekiti State asked the AGF to convene an emergency meeting of Body of Attorneys-General to debate the issue of the deplorable conditions of prisons and inmates and come out with concrete remedy that will make life bearable for the inmates.
“It would have been odd in the extreme if the working group had simply focused on the status of Section 35 inmates and ignored the plight of other inmates deserving urgent attention.
“This category of inmates includes those without legal representation. Indeed, several inmates continue to be kept in detention for periods longer than the maximum period of imprisonment prescribed for the offence because they do not have legal representation.
“The working group found that an alarmingly high number of inmates in the custodial centres under review were without legal representation. The AGF is invited to note that although the legal aid council of Nigeria is mandated to provide free legal services to inmates without legal representation, it is presently under-resourced and thus barely able to make a significant difference”, he said.
In a remarks, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, disclosed that the working group was constituted as part of efforts to ensure access to justice and ensure that persons are not unduly detained In our custodial centres.
According to the Minister, the move is in line with the Renewed Hope agenda of the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and in line with the obligations under various national and international instruments, including the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. 1999 (as amended). the international standards stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (KCCPR), African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) and other human rights instruments to which Nigeria is a party,
“This mandate of the working group is crucial to achieving the standards we have set for ourselves in our effort to reform our criminal justice system. The vision of Mr President is for a criminal justice system that maintains law and order, deters crime, punishes Offenders, while at the same time strives to rehabilitate those offenders to facilitate their recovery and reintegration to society”, he said.
