By Patience Ogbodo-Iwuagwu - Bauchi
Project Manager of SFCG, Hajiya Lantana Abdullahi, added: “Escalating violence in Northern Nigeria has necessitated the deployment of a heightened security presence across the region. While security forces have a mandate to maintain peace, their officers have been implicated in human rights abuse against civilians. Serious abuses include extrajudicial killing, rape, torture, arbitrary detention, extortion, and harassment.
“SFCG will employ our Common Ground Approach to human rights by training and coordinating key stakeholders to increase their capacity to promote respect for human rights, creating human rights awareness among the general population while managing their expectations, and providing government and security actors a venue for constructive dialogue with civil society and affected communities,” she stated.
“The NHRC is the most likely government institution to be able to take a lead on this issue, as it has a constitutional mandate to protect human rights and the stature to present its reports before the National Assembly in Abuja, which could present a valuable future public advocacy opportunity.
According to Hajia Abdulahui, SFCG and partners will also support platform-building to create strategic links between target stakeholders, building on the strengths of each partner “ we will also facilitate Collaborative Problem-Solving Dialogues between actors aimed at making a plurality of voices, including the marginalized.
SFCG will embark on series of activities in the next 18 months in North East and North Central according to Hajia Abdullahi. Some of these activities includ Peace Architecture Dialogues Between Security Actors and Civil Society, Community Forum with Security Actors by bringing citizens and leader from affected communities together with local security actors to address and analyze community problems as well develop joint solutions while ensuring wide range of viewpoints are represented, particularly those of women, youths, minorities, and the disabled. She urged security agents to respect rigths of the citizens and expressed optimism that at the end of the project, the principle of the rule of law will be full implemented in the country.
Speaking at the occasion, the Country Director of SFCG, Chom Bagu lamented the high rate of violation of human right, extra-judiciary killings, rape in the Norther region saying that these factors have aggravated the violence situation in the region.
He said the project seeks to reduce violence in the north-east and create a platform for dialogue where civil society and stakeholders can brainstorm on issues of human rigth violation.
According to him,“ the objective of this project is to strategize on ways whereby conflict issues between security forces and civil societies can be reduced to the barest minimum and in achieving this madate, the project have developed a different appproach whereby a platform for dialogue between the security agents, civil societies and government can be created in order to deal on issues of abuse of human rigth”.
Bagu said that the NGO will strengthen the civil society organizations to monitor and report issues of human rigth violations so that the colloborative efforts between security agents and the communities can be stregthened.
He said “The project also aims at training stakeholders to respect human rigths and foster communication ties between the various communities through media programmes and publicity. It will be also sensitive to ethnic and religious sentiments, gender disparity as well as create problem seeking dialogue for stakeholders to resolve conflict issues and reach out to key policy makers in the north-east region.”
The post Tackling human rights abuses in North (2) appeared first on Daily Independent Newspapers.