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Bakassi is a peninsula on the Gulf of Guinea. It lies between the Cross River estuary, near the city of Calabar and the Rio del Ray estuary on the east. It is governed by Cameroon, following the transfer of sovereignty from neighbouring Nigeria as a result of a judgment by the International Court of Justice. On 22 November 2007, the Nigerian Senate rejected the transfer, since the Greentree Agreement ceding the area to Cameroon was contrary to Section 12(1) of the 1999 Constitution. Regardless, the territory was completely ceded to Cameroon on 14 August 2008, exactly two years after the first part of it was transferred.
Vigilantism is the act of preventing, investigating, and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority.
Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in all societies.
Extrajudicial punishment is a punishment for an alleged crime or offense which is carried out without legal process or supervision by a court or tribunal through a legal proceeding.
Paul Biya is a Cameroonian politician who has served as the second president of Cameroon since 1982, having previously been the fifth prime minister of Cameroon from 1975 to 1982. As of 2024, he is the second-longest-ruling president in Africa and the longest consecutively serving current non-royal national leader in the world and the oldest head of state in the world.
The Southern Cameroons was the southern part of the British League of Nations mandate territory of the British Cameroons in West Africa. Since 1961, it has been part of the Republic of Cameroon, where it makes up the Northwest Region and Southwest Region. Since 1994, pressure groups in the territory claim there was no legal document in accordance to UNGA RES 1608(XV) paragraph 5, and are seeking to restore statehood and independence from the Republic. They renamed the British Southern Cameroons as Ambazonia.
The Bakassi Boys were a group of Nigerian youth vigilantes who operated majorly in the south-eastern and south-southern regions of Nigeria, between 1998 and 2006. Activities of the vigilante group included targeting perpetrators of armed robberies, ritual killings, kidnapping, such as in the case of Eddy Nawgu, an alleged prophet and occultist whom they killed and beheaded.
The Davao Death Squad (DDS) is a vigilante group in Davao City, Philippines. The group is alleged to have conducted summary executions of street children and individuals suspected of petty crimes and drug dealing. It has been estimated that the group is responsible for the killing or disappearance of between 1,020 and 1,040 people between 1998 and 2008. A 2009 report by the Philippine Commission on Human Rights (CHR) noted stonewalling by local police under the mayorship of Rodrigo Duterte while a leaked cable observed a lack of public outrage among Davao residents.
An extrajudicial killing is the deliberate killing of a person without the lawful authority granted by a judicial proceeding. It typically refers to government authorities, whether lawfully or unlawfully, targeting specific people for death, which in authoritarian regimes often involves political, trade union, dissident, religious and social figures. The term is typically used in situations that imply the human rights of the victims have been violated; deaths caused by legal police actions or legal warfighting on a battlefield are generally not included, even though military and police forces are often used for killings seen by critics as illegitimate. The label "extrajudicial killing" has also been applied to organized, lethal enforcement of extralegal social norms by non-government actors, including lynchings and honor killings.
Stoning, or lapidation, is a method of capital punishment where a group throws stones at a person until the subject dies from blunt trauma. It has been attested as a form of punishment for grave misdeeds since ancient times.
In Nigeria, Sharia has been instituted as a main body of civil and criminal law in twelve Muslim-majority states since 1999, when then-Zamfara State governor Ahmad Sani Yerima began the push for the institution of Sharia at the state level of government. A "declaration of full Sharia law" was made in the twelve states in that year, and the states created Islamic legal institutions such as a Sharia Commission, and Zakat Commission, and a hisbah. According to some critics, the adoption of Sharia law violates Article 10 of the Nigerian constitution guaranteeing religious freedom.
White caps were groups involved in the whitecapping movement who were operating in southern Indiana in the late 19th century. They engaged in vigilante justice and lynchings, with modern viewpoints describing their actions as domestic terrorism. They became common in the state following the American Civil War and lasted until the turn of the 20th century. White caps were especially active in Crawford and neighboring counties in the late 1880s. Several members of the Reno Gang were lynched in 1868, causing an international incident. Some of the members had been extradited to the United States from Canada and were supposed to be under federal protection. Lynchings continued against other criminals, but when two possibly innocent men were killed in Corydon in 1889, Indiana responded by cracking down on the white cap vigilante groups, beginning in the administration of Isaac P. Gray.
Boko Haram, officially known as Jamā'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da'wah wa'l-Jihād, is an Islamist terrorist jihadist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, which is also active in Chad, Niger, northern Cameroon, and Mali. In 2016, the group split, resulting in the emergence of a hostile faction known as the Islamic State's West Africa Province.
Relations between Cameroon and Nigeria were established in 1960, the same year that each country obtained its independence. Since then, their relationship has revolved in large part around their extensive shared border, as well as the legacy of colonial arrangements under which areas of Cameroon were administered as part of British Nigeria. The countries came close to war in the 1990s in the culmination of a long-running dispute over the sovereignty of the Bakassi peninsula. In the 21st century, however, a return to conviviality has been achieved, partly because the demarcation of their border has been formalised, and partly because the Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad basin has necessitated increasingly close cooperation in regional security matters.
Witch hunts are a contemporary phenomenon occurring globally, with notable occurrences in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Nepal, and Papua New Guinea. Modern witch hunts surpass the body counts of early-modern witch-hunting. Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Nigeria, experiences a high prevalence of witch-hunting. In Cameroon, accusations have resurfaced in courts, often involving child-witchcraft scares. Gambia witnessed government-sponsored witch hunts, leading to abductions, forced confessions, and deaths.
The Kano State Hisbah Corps is a religious police force in Kano state, Nigeria responsible for the enforcement of Shari'a to only Muslims in Kano state and other parts of the northern Nigeria. Malam yahaya faruk chedi is the first commander General of Hisba, followed by Sheik Ibrahim Mu'azzam Maibushra and then Sheik Aminu Ibrahim Daurawa. Sheikh Daurawa resigned as commander of Hisbah Kano in 2019, as of 2022, its commander is Haruna Ibn-Sina. Sheikh Daurawa was reappointed by Kano State governor Abba Kabir Yusuf in 2023 as its commander.
Eddy Nawgu was a Nigerian alleged sorcerer, occultist and, as described by the Nigerian media; a false prophet who initially proclaimed himself to be a prophet of the biblical Abrahamic God. He bore several sobriquets throughout his life time but was predominantly known in the mid-1990s as Eddy Nawgu, alternatively spelt as Eddie Nawgu among Igbo people. An alternative form of this name, Eddy na Nawgu, which translates to Eddy in Nawgu, came about because he was from the Nawgu community, a town situated in the Dunukofia LGA of Anambra State, Nigeria.
Mob justice is when a person suspected to be a criminal is beaten by a group of people or crowd with clubs, stones, machetes, or anything they can lay their hands on. In some cases the alleged criminal dies in the process due to excessive beating or they are set on fire using old car tires and fuel. Mob justice, also known as ‘instant justice’ or ‘jungle justice’, occurs in various towns and cities in Ghana. According to the laws of Ghana, this act is illegal and intolerable, but it occurs at an increasing rate. People who engage in this act are usually onlookers or people passing by or an organized group also known as "community vigilantes" whose aim is to protect the community from criminals.
The Bakassi conflict is an ongoing armed dispute over the Bakassi Peninsula of Cameroon. Originally subject to a border conflict between Cameroon and Nigeria, Bakassi later became affected by insurgencies waged by local separatists against Cameroonian government forces.
On 12 May 2022, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a second-year Christian college student, was stoned to death by a mob of Muslim students in Sokoto, Nigeria, after being accused of blasphemy against Islam. The muslim suspects arrested were charged with "Criminal conspiracy and incitement of public disturbance", bailable offences with a maximum 2 year jail time. A team of 34 lawyers led by Prof. Mansur Ibrahim defended the suspects who were subsequently acquitted by the court citing non-showing of prosecution lawyers.
References
- ↑ Cameroon's predicament, Peter Tse Angwafo, p 119
- ↑ Nigeria's vigilante 'jungle justice', BBC News
- ↑ Jungle Justice: A Vicious Violation if Human Rights in Africa, Amara Onu
- ↑ Cable thief given muddy treatment in Anambra (Graphic Photos), Pulse
- 1 2 The Bakassi Boys: fighting crime in Nigeria, Johannes Harnischfeger, The Journal of Modern African Studies
- ↑ Human Security and the Problem of Jungle (Mob) Justice in Cameroon, Samah, 2006 [ dead link ]