Activist lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN), has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to grant full and unconditional pardon to 70 soldiers convicted for mutiny by a military court martial in 2015 pursuant to Section 175 of the Constitution.
The lawyer said he made the request in line with the policy of the Federal Government to review the cases of the convicted soldiers.
His request was contained in a letter, dated August 25, 2021, addressed to President Buhari.
Falana recalled that while prosecuting the war on terror, the Federal Government deployed thousands of “ill-equipped and ill-motivated members of the Armed Forces to the Northeast to fight the well-armed insurgents from 2013 to 2014”.
The lawyer said majority of the dedicated members of the Armed Forces defended the country’s territorial integrity and successfully defeated the Boko Haram sect and regained the areas which had been annexed by the terrorists.
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He said in the course of defending the country, the troops demanded for arms and armament from the military authorities but were accused of sabotaging the counter-insurgency operations of the Federal Government and were courts-martialled for alleged mutiny. Falana said his law firm defended 58 soldiers while the remaining 12 were defended by other lawyer before the Courts-Martial which sat in Abuja.
At the end of the trials in August and December 2014, the Courts-Martial jailed some of the soldiers and sentenced 70 others to death.
Falana argued that since the convicted soldiers have served the prison term in at the Kirikiri and Ikoyi, the President should not hesitate to grant them full pardon, pursuant to Section 175 of the Constitution.
He said under the law, such demand should not attract any penalty, “so far as the complaint does not contravene any provisions of the Act”.
According to him, the Courts-Martial failed to consider the case of CPL Segun Oladele & 22 Ors. v. Nigerian Army (2003) 36 WRN 68; (2004) 6 NWLR (PT 868) 166, where the Court of Appeal had quashed the life imprisonment imposed on the appellants for protesting the injustice meted out to them by the military authorities.
Speaking for the Court, Aderemi JCA (as he then was) had said: “Let it be said that members of the Armed Forces in this country have not denounced their membership of the Nigerian society and it seems to me that they cannot do so in a manner calculated to jettison the provisions of the Nigerian Constitution, the ground norm.
“The members of the Armed Forces are not excluded from the application of the provisions of the Fundamental Rights the likes of right to life, right to personal liberty, right to fair hearing, right to freedom from discrimination etc.”
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