-By Abdul Mahmud
The news from Advocates Sans Frontieres France should trouble every conscience. Eighty two Nigerian women now sit on death row in different correctional centres. Their stories never for once told hide behind the walls. Their names rarely appear in public conversations. Their lives only exist in the long shadow of a criminal justice system that refuses to see women as full persons. The Country Director of ASF France, Angela Uzoma Iwuchukwu, spoke in Abuja this week. Her words opened a window into a crisis long ignored, even by advocates of civil liberties. Nigeria now has one of the highest female death row populations in sub Saharan Africa, she said. These women face the death penalty, a punishment that many scholars describe as gendered violence orchestrated by the state. How sad that the law turns its back on these women. Courts ignore the years of suffering that often precede the moment that leads to criminal charge.
Many women on death row reacted to prolonged abuse. Some faced domestic violence. Some faced forced marriages. Some endured sexual assault. Some lived for years with controlling partners who ruled their bodies. When violence reached a breaking point, they pushed back. When that moment produced death, the law moved against them with speed. Prosecutors treated them as aggressors. Courts stripped their stories of context. The feminist legal theorist Carol Smart warned that the law often behaves like a male language. It speaks in the tongue of power, or what Judith Butler, the author of Bodies That Matter, described as the logic of the masculine symbolic order that decides which bodies are recognised and which bodies can be ignored. It excludes women from its moral universe. The Nigerian experience proves both Smart and Butler right. When abused women stand before courts, the law reads their acts as rebellion against social order. Courts punish them not only for the offence but for refusing to remain silent victims.
This is what Uzoma Iwuchukwu described as the double punishment that women face. First for the act that leads to conviction. Second for daring to act at all. Nigerian judges rarely apply doctrines like the battered woman syndrome. Nigerian prosecutors rarely present the social conditions that shaped the accused. Nigerian investigators rarely ask why a woman acted in the way she did. A leading scholar of domestic violence whose name I cannot recall now once argued that law often refuses to see coercive control as a continuous process. It treats violence as single events. It ignores the history of abuse. That blindness appears again and again in Nigerian courtrooms.
Poverty deepens this crisis. Many women on death row had no legal representation during investigation. Some had lawyers who lacked training in gender sensitive defence. Some had no money to secure independent medical reports. Some could not speak English. Some could not read their own statements. These failures carry the mark of what gender activists call intersectionality. Women suffer from overlapping layers of marginalisation. Gender. Class. Poverty. Culture. The law punishes those layers with a cold indifference. The situation in northern states under Sharia law raises further questions. The 2002 Katsina case of Amina Lawal offers a painful example. A young woman was sentenced to death by stoning for becoming pregnant outside marriage. The sentence which violated international human rights standards, conflicted with the African Charter, and contradicts the principle of human dignity, was eventually set aside by the Sharia Court of Appeal. As I have consistently argued, punishments that destroy the body cannot stand in a modern legal order. Nigeria continues to apply them. These women do not receive proper legal aid. They do not receive counsel trained in Sharia procedural rights. They stand before courts that see pregnancy as proof of wrongdoing. They carry the full weight of perverse judgements. But, it takes two to tango. Their partners escape accountability. The culture of silence protects the men. The full force of the law falls on the women. Alone.
The Nigerian Correctional Centres hide the daily struggles of these women. Many live with untreated trauma. Many carry injuries from past abuse. Many raise children in prison. Scholars like Julia Sudbury describe this as the prison industrial punishment of women who are already victims. Nigeria mirrors this pattern. The system treats their pains as irrelevant. The system measures only their offence. The death penalty itself raises moral and constitutional problems. Nigeria continues to retain it. Nigeria continues to sentence people under laws inherited from colonial rule. The United Nations has urged countries to restrict the death penalty for the most serious crimes. For women charged with murder arising from domestic violence, the law ignores international standards that call for mitigation based on personal history. Hannah Arendt wrote that violence flourishes when the state loses moral authority. The state gains no moral authority when it kills women who acted to save their own lives. The criminal justice system claims to defend social order. It ends up defending patriarchy. It creates a cycle in which women face violence in the home and violence in the courtroom.
The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence should move Nigeria to reflection. This country cannot talk about ending violence against women while sentencing women who once fought for their own survival to the death row. Gender based violence does not end with awareness campaigns. It ends when the law listens. It ends when judges understand trauma. It ends when police treat abuse as a crime. It ends when prosecutors recognise the role of coercive control. Reform must begin with investigation. Police officers need training in interviewing survivors of domestic violence. Prosecutors need guidelines that demand full inquiry into the background of female defendants. Courts need sentencing frameworks that recognise the role of prolonged abuse. Legal aid must reach every woman. Civil society organisations must have access to women on death row. Sharia courts require urgent review, if not abolition. Punishments that destroy the body belong to an age that no longer exists. Nigeria must bring those courts in line with constitutional guarantees of dignity. Women must not face death by stoning. Pregnancy must not function as evidence of guilt. Nigeria must also confront the culture that keeps women silent. Violence inside homes continues because society treats it as a private matter. Domestic violence is a crime. Survivor stories must shape public policy. Scholars like bell hooks (the scholar who prefers her name in lower case) remind us that patriarchy survives through silence. Breaking that silence remains the first step to freedom.
The eighty two women on death row represent a national failure. They represent the refusal of the state to protect the vulnerable. They represent a justice system that sees women through a distorted lens. Their continued imprisonment exposes the gap between constitutional promises and lived reality. Our country must not turn away from them. Their stories deserve attention. Their lives deserve compassion. Their trials deserve review. Justice must mean more than the mechanical application of law. Justice must reflect the human condition. Justice must listen to the voices that society has long pushed to the margins. Our country cannot claim progress while women wait for death in forgotten cells. Their freedom begins with truth. Their protection begins with reform. Their survival begins with a criminal justice system that treats them as human beings.
Thank you, Angela Uzoma Iwuchukwu, for drawing our country’s attention to the plight of the forgotten women on death row.