The recent public parade of a Bishop in Port Harcourt by the police for allegedly assaulting a minor brings to the fore the many instances of abuse of fundamental human rights by the police.
As reported by the newspapers, the Bishop, while being paraded by the police, reportedly admitted to the press that he actually had carnal knowledge of the 15-year-old, but blamed it on the devil and the Bishop in whose church he had been ministering as a guest pastor when the incident took place.
The Bishop’s version of events that led to the alleged sexual incident was that he had been invited as a guest minister by a Bishop with whom he had had running battles over who should head the Communion of Bishops in Rivers State. During counselling session, a young girl walked in for deliverance and while he was casting out her demons, she began to take off her clothes and in the Bishop’s own words, “before I realised what was happening I found myself on top of her and had carnal knowledge of her”.
According to the Bishop, the girl started laughing at him soon after the act and asked him if he was angry with himself after observing his sullen countenance. Again in the Bishop’s own words, “I was so angry and annoyed that I called some of my pastors and made a confession that I did not know what was happening”.
About a month later, the girl’s father called the Bishop to say his daughter was pregnant. The father procured abortion for his daughter while the Bishop footed the bills. However, the police are now alleging rape and on the basis of which they decided to parade the Bishop before the press and the public.
Like I said earlier, Nigeria is a country of absurdities a country where anything can happen and do in fact happen on a daily basis. As a result, its people have longed ceased to be shocked, their sensitivity having been continuously buffeted by one absurdity or the other, each one dwarfing the one before it in grotesque details.
The fact that there has been no official condemnation or denunciation of this primitive practice of parading , or more appropriately, trying criminal suspects in the press before their day in court lend credence to the above assertion. Without underplaying the enormity of the depth of infamy into which this bishop has sunk by his moral failure, the decision of the Police to parade him before the public was clearly born out of nothing but a desire to humiliate him and ultimately prejudice his trial.
Clearly, the constitution of Nigeria presumes as innocent a man accused of an offence until he is proved guilty by a competent court of jurisdiction. Nowhere in our statutes can a provision be found empowering the police or any other law enforcement agency to first humiliate a suspect, thoroughly shame and disgrace him before passing him over to a law court for his trial.
The only instance where the police are allowed by law to parade a suspect is where there is need for the identification of the suspect by a witness who claims to have seen the suspect commit the alleged offence. In this case, the suspect is lined up amidst other people while the witness attempts to point him out from the crowd. This is called identification parade and it does not take place before the press.
Parading suspected criminals in the media is already convicting the person in the court of public opinion. There is no way you can ensure that a person has a free and fair trial if you have already given the public a bad impression about the person.
This illegality takes place so often that some members of the public have come to accept it as the norm and the media make it look like it is legal. But no, it is illegal and a clear violation of the suspect’s fundamental rights both under the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights.
One is at a loss to fathom what kind of justice a suspect can possibly hope to get in the trial court after he has been paraded by the police as a criminal, his face shown on the television, in the newspapers and, in this age of social media, on the internet. One is tempted to say thankfully we do not practice jury system in Nigeria otherwise one can imagine the difficulty in choosing a panel of jury from a public who have already been made to view the suspect as guilty. However, when we consider that our judges also read newspapers, watch TV and surf the internet, our gratitude suffers something of an eclipse.
There is no doubt that the single most important reason while the police engage in this practice is for publicity to call attention to itself and make the public believe that it is actually fighting crime. But it is a poor approach in winning back the confidence of the public that has long lost faith in the ability of the Nigerian police to protect it in the face of the current, unprecedented upsurge in scale of violent crimes across the land.
And for this publicity, the police are willing to do anything to get it including parading animals and toddlers as robbery or criminal suspects. In 2009, the entire nation was bewildered and for some of us who can still be shocked by the events in this country embarrassed when the Nigeria police, Kwara State Command, paraded a goat as an arm robbery suspect. The goat suspect was detained over an alleged attempt to steal a Mazda car.
As if that was not bizarre enough, the recent parading of a two month old baby by the police in Abeokuta has left not a few Nigerians in shock. Newspaper reports have it that the police in Abeokuta paraded a two-month old baby, his mother and his fifteen-year old brother over an alleged robbery committed by their father. The family was arrested after the suspect fled his home on arrival of the Police.
The nation was so shocked that a non-governmental organisation the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria called for the officers involved in this show of shame and abuse of the rights of the toddler to be thoroughly disciplined. If the authorities are willing to demonstrate for once that they listen to the Nigerians people, the officers who are involved in these despicable practices ought to be severely punished.
In the end, this calls for an overhaul of the Police Force and re-orientation and re-training of its officers and men in line with the code of modern policing and international best practices. It can never be said enough that the parading of a Bishop by the Police was a most egregious form of violation of his fundamental human rights, namely his right to dignity and presumption of innocence as provided in the Nigerian Constitution.
