The Senate Committee on Army has cautioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) against its decision to investigate the Nigerian Army over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said in a statement on Friday that her office recognised that the vast majority of the crimes committed in Nigeria were attributable to non-state actors, but that it had also found a “reasonable basis” to believe that members of the Nigerian security forces had also committed crimes.
This, it said, included murder, rape, torture and cruel treatment, as well as enforced disappearance and forcible transfer of the population and attacks directed at civilians.
Amnesty International welcomed the ICC decision as an “important milestone” and urged it to swiftly begin an “effective and well-resourced investigation”.
But the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Army, Senator Ali Ndume, said the move by the ICC would “destroy things instead of help matters” and the Nigerian parliament “won’t tolerate that.”
In an interview with newsmen in Abuja, Ndume said the power to investigate Nigerian government agencies lies with the National Assembly, and that the ICC and other international human rights organisations could be invited “only when there is a failure on the part of the three arms of government to act swiftly.”
He said: “We are not encouraging human rights abuses. We can’t say there are no such things but they are definitely isolated cases especially when the Boko Haram insurgency reached its peak in 2014.
“There was a kind of confusion that led to the isolated cases of human rights abuses by the Nigerian Army and some of the armed forces. However, we stood up against it that time and that led to some soldiers being court-martialed for human rights abuses. Some were even dismissed from the army.”
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