The long-awaited report of the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, completed in May 2002, has now been made public, by civil society organizations. In December 2004, the government said it was not planning to publish the wide-ranging report, popularly known as the Oputa report after the name of the panel’s chairman, retired Chief Justice Chukwudifu A. Oputa. (27-JAN-05)
This article first appeared in yesterday’s edfition of AfricaFocus Bulletin. It has been edited for republication here.
The Nigerian Democratic Movement (NDM), based in Washington, in collaboration with the Civil Society Forum in Nigeria, decided to take the initiative to make this public domain document available over the internet. It is now being widely distributed in Nigeria through copies on CD-ROM as well. The AfricaFocus Bulletin from which this article derives contains excerpts from the NDM press release on the report’s publication, and excerpts taken from the report’s overview volume.
Three former military rulers refused to testify
The panel’s deliberations covered not only specific human rights abuses, but also responded to a wide variety of grievances and issues presented by individual and group petitioners. As reported in a previous article on www.humanrightshouse.org, the panel was most controversial for the refusal to testify of three former military rulers, Ibrahim Babangida, Muhammadu Buhari and Abdulsalami Abubakar. The final report included the recommendation that they be investigated for suspicious deaths and barred from governing Nigeria again. The full 7-volume report and summary recommendations are available, in downloadable PDF files, at http://www.nigerianmuse.com/nigeriawatch/oputa, which also contains a timeline and an extensive set of links to news articles on the Oputa Panel report.
