Category Archives: News

18Mar/24

Armed Groups Kidnap Hundreds Across Northern Nigeria

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Children play at the LEA Primary and Secondary School Kuriga two days after 287 students were kidnapped, Kuriga, Kaduna State, Nigeria, March 9, 2024. 
© 2024 Sunday Alamba/AP Photo

Various armed groups have kidnapped hundreds of people, including 287 schoolchildren, across northern Nigeria in a series of alarming attacks since late February. The kidnappings are the latest indication of Nigeria’s spiraling security crisis, as communities continue to face severe threats from Islamist insurgents like Boko Haram in the country’s northeast and other criminal groups in the northwest.

On February 29, suspected Boko Haram insurgents abducted over 200 internally displaced people, many of them children, in the Ngala Local Government Area of Borno State.

Then, on March 7, criminal gangs known as “bandits” kidnapped 287 students, including many girls, at the government secondary school in Kuriga town, in northwestern Kaduna State. Two days later, bandits broke into a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso village in Sokoto State and kidnapped 15 children as they slept.

The abductions have continued. Most recently, on March 18, over 87 people were reported to have been kidnapped in Kajuru community in Kaduna State.

Mass kidnappings by insurgents and other criminal groups have been a problem across the country’s northern regions since Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014, an atrocity that garnered wide international attention.

Government security forces have said they are working to obtain the safe release of the victims but face difficulties reaching remote forest areas where they are being held. Bandits have demanded 1 billion naira (about US$600,000) as ransom for the schoolchildren kidnapped in Kaduna, but Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has directed that no ransom be paid.

The Nigerian authorities should seek the safe release of those kidnapped, put in place adequate measures to prevent more kidnappings, particularly of vulnerable students, and hold perpetrators to account. 

18Mar/24

US Truth and Healing Commission on Indigenous Boarding Schools is Long Overdue

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A makeshift memorial for the dozens of Indigenous children who died more than a century ago while attending a boarding school that was once located nearby at a public park in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 1, 2021. 
© 2021 AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File

From 1819 to 1969, the United States federal government funded and operated 408 known “Indian boarding schools” with the express intent to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The government systematically and forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and communities, violating their human rights. Now, Native advocates, survivors, and members of the US Congress have reintroduced a federal bill that would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to examine the full range of harms from the boarding school system.

These boarding schools were established to separate, including by violence, Indigenous children from their families, communities, cultures, and land, with the goal of cultural decimation and land dispossession. Hundreds of thousands of children were removed from their communities because of this policy. Once at the schools, Indigenous children were often subjected to forced labor, sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, starvation, and death. The schools were operated by religious institutions in collaboration with the US federal government. When perpetrators killed children, the children were often buried in unmarked graves. These deaths were hidden, and the extent of abuse is yet to be uncovered, though the US Department of the Interior predicts the number of children killed will be “in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

Individual Indigenous children were deprived of their rights to life, health, security, family, religion, and education, among other rights. And Indigenous communities were deprived of many rights, including their rights to culture, language, family, security, and religion.

The legacy of this harrowing system that continued for more than a century reverberates through every Indigenous person in the United States. Advocates, survivors, and communities face intergenerational trauma, higher rates of poverty, and loss of language, land, traditions, and culture. Despite this, Indigenous communities in the US remain culturally distinct, resilient, and sovereign.

Through Senate Bill 1723 and House Bill 7227, an Indigenous-led step towards justice, Native advocates are demanding the United States take this step toward justice and healing. Under the bills, a new federal commission would examine the location of missing children, document the impacts of boarding school policies, hold culturally appropriate public hearings to collect testimony from survivors and descendants, and provide a list of recommendations for further healing. Congress should pass the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding Schools Act.

18Mar/24

Opposition Leader in Court in Central African Republic

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Crepin Mboli Goumba (right) with his defense team after he is provisionally released from the Central Office for the Repression of Banditry (OCRB) in Bangui, Central African Republic, March 6, 2024.
© 2024 Private

“They held him there to send a message to the rest of us: be careful, or else.” A human rights activist from the Central African Republic said this to Human Rights Watch after Crépin Mboli Goumba, a prominent political opponent, was arrested and sent to a police unit notorious for torture, executions, and shooting suspects on sight.

On March 3, Mboli Goumba was arrested on charges of contempt of court after a press conference during which he accused four judges and the minister of justice of corruption, offering documentation to support his accusations and asking authorities to investigate.

Instead of a police station in the city, Mboli Goumba was taken to the headquarters of the Central Office for the Repression of Banditry (Office Central de Répression du Banditisme, OCRB), a police unit created in the late 1990s to address a rise in banditry that developed a notorious reputation for abuse. In 2016, Human Rights Watch released a report outlining how members of the OCRB unlawfully executed at least 18 people and possibly more between April 2015 and March 2016.

For the past two years the Central African Republic’s ruling party, the United Hearts Movement (Mouvement Cœurs Unis) and its supporters have waged a crackdown on civil society, media, and the political opposition. Since the idea for a constitutional referendum to remove presidential term limits first surfaced in 2022, governmental institutions, including police, have threatened civil society advocates, accused them of collaborating with armed groups, and prevented opposition protests.

Mboli Goumba was not mistreated at the OCRB, but if convicted, he could face up to 2 years in prison. He told Human Rights Watch that OCRB officials said his case was “tied to politics.”

Mboli Goumba was provisionally released on March 6 and had his first appearance in court last week. While the trial was postponed for a week, his initial detention at the OCRB sends a clear message: tough times lie ahead for opponents and critics.