Legal Scrutiny Over Alleged Religious Persecution in Nigeria as Expert Links Atrocities to International Genocide Law
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A powerful and deeply researched legal brief authored by Apostle and Nation Builder Citizen Bolaji O. Akinyemi has accused extremist groups operating across Northern and Middle Belt Nigeria of committing acts that amount to crimes against humanity and genocide under international law, linking atrocities to acts of religious persecution in Nigeria and state inaction.
The document, titled “Establishing Genocide Against Christians in Nigeria,” asserts that the widespread atrocities perpetrated by Boko Haram, ISWAP, Fulani militant herders, and their networks meet all the legal and factual requirements of genocide as defined under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which Nigeria is a signatory through its domestication in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The legal submission challenges the longstanding narrative of “communal clashes” or “banditry” often used by officials to downplay the gravity of Nigeria’s religious violence. It instead situates the ongoing attacks within a clear legal architecture of targeted extermination, arguing that the intent, method, and pattern of violence against Christian populations constitute genocide in every sense recognized by international jurisprudence.
According to Akinyemi, the campaign of violence against Christians in Northern and Middle Belt Nigeria represents “a sustained policy of annihilation by extremist groups, enabled by the state’s refusal to protect, prosecute, or prevent.” The brief, he said, “does not speak the language of diplomacy, but the language of evidence and law.”
Contents
International Legal Foundation and Context
At the heart of the argument lies Article II of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Such acts include the killing of members of that group, infliction of serious bodily or mental harm, deliberate imposition of destructive living conditions, measures intended to prevent births, and the forcible transfer of children to another group.
Akinyemi’s analysis methodically maps factual incidents across Nigeria’s conflict zones to these criteria, asserting that the pattern of violence mirrors those documented in previous genocides adjudicated in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
The legal brief situates Boko Haram’s ideology as foundational to the genocidal campaign. It recalls that the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf, and his successor, Abubakar Shekau, openly declared war on Christians and Western civilization, calling Christianity “a corruption of faith” and Western education “a disease.” The phrase “Boko Haram”, meaning “Western education is forbidden,” thus emerged as a religiously charged mandate for destruction.
Patterns of Violence and Intent to Destroy
Akinyemi’s submission details decades of coordinated killings, bombings, abductions, and displacements aimed primarily at Christian populations. From the 2011 Christmas Day bombing of St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, which claimed 44 lives and injured scores, to the 2014 abduction of 276 Chibok schoolgirls, and the massacres across Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, and Taraba between 2018 and 2023, the pattern of violence, he argues, reveals clear intent to destroy the group in part.
The brief documents how Christian-majority communities like Barkin Ladi, Agatu, Miango, and Mangu have been subjected to night raids, mass executions, and the razing of entire villages by Fulani militant herders and insurgents, while state authorities either fail to respond or actively downplay the atrocities. “Each of these incidents,” Akinyemi writes, “demonstrates not random violence, but the targeted elimination of Christians identified as the ‘people of the Book.’”
The Psychological and Physical Machinery of Extermination
The brief goes beyond killings to examine the deeper mechanisms of destruction—what it describes as the “architecture of extermination.” It highlights how rape, torture, mutilation, and psychological terror have been systematically used to break the physical and moral resistance of Christian communities.
Captured women and girls—such as those from Chibok, Dapchi, and the case of Leah Sharibu—were subjected to forced marriages, sexual slavery, and religious conversion, creating multi-generational trauma. In many cases, Christian women were raped, impregnated, and their children indoctrinated under extremist control, effectively erasing their religious and cultural lineage.
Villages were not only destroyed but desecrated; pastors were executed on video, and children were made to watch their parents die, ensuring long-term psychological devastation. Over three million internally displaced persons (IDPs), largely Christians, now languish in camps with minimal humanitarian aid, suffering conditions that the brief likens to the “destructive living conditions” recognized in international genocide jurisprudence such as Prosecutor v. Karadžić at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Economic and Social Erasure
According to the brief, a central component of the genocidal campaign is the deliberate destruction of livelihoods. Thousands of Christian farmlands across the Middle Belt have been seized or occupied by militants, cutting off economic sustenance and ensuring starvation among survivors. Akinyemi argues that this deliberate economic asphyxiation represents “an unspoken policy of extermination by displacement.”
He adds that the Nigerian government’s repeated failure to prosecute attackers or rebuild destroyed communities demonstrates state complicity by omission. The absence of protection or reconstruction effectively enforces the annihilation of Christian presence in ancestral territories.
The report further contends that the conditions in IDP camps—marked by hunger, overcrowding, lack of education, and absence of medical services—mirror those deemed genocidal under previous international court rulings.
The Assault on Reproduction and Future Generations
One of the most striking sections of the legal brief concerns the use of sexual violence and forced conversions to prevent births within the Christian community. Boko Haram’s well-documented abductions, forced pregnancies, and the raising of offspring under extremist religious indoctrination, Akinyemi argues, meet the definition of biological destruction under Article II(d) of the Genocide Convention.
Pregnant women have been deliberately targeted and killed during raids, maternity clinics in Christian villages have been burned, and entire populations denied reproductive healthcare—creating, in Akinyemi’s words, “a silent genocide through the womb.”
The brief references the Prosecutor v. Akayesu decision of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where forced impregnation and sexual violence were recognized as tools of genocide. By these standards, Nigeria’s ongoing atrocities, he concludes, qualify as acts intended to prevent births within a religious group.
Forcible Conversion and the Loss of Children
The document also addresses the forced transfer of children, another core element of genocide. It highlights the large-scale abduction of minors in Chibok, Dapchi, and Zamfara, where thousands of children have been kidnapped, forcibly converted, and trained as militants under jihadist ideology.
Many of these abducted children, reports confirm, are renamed, indoctrinated in Arabic, and permanently separated from their Christian families. The government’s apparent lack of urgency in recovering or rehabilitating them, the brief notes, ensures the permanence of their cultural erasure. This meets the international legal test of forcible transfer under Article II(e) of the Convention.
Establishing Genocidal Intent
Akinyemi’s brief stresses that intent, or dolus specialis, can be inferred from the pattern, repetition, and public justification of the acts. Boko Haram’s manifestos, Shekau’s video declarations, and the targeting of Christians during holidays such as Christmas and Easter all establish a clear motive: the elimination of Christians from Northern Nigeria.
Moreover, the Nigerian government’s consistent failure to prosecute perpetrators or to protect Christian populations is characterized as tacit approval—a standard recognized in Jelisić v. The Prosecutor (ICTY) as satisfying the knowledge and acceptance element of genocidal policy.
A Comparative and Historical Perspective
The brief situates Nigeria’s crisis within the global history of genocide, drawing comparisons with Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. In each of these cases, the pattern of mass killings, forced displacement, sexual violence, and the destruction of community structures was recognized by international courts as evidence of genocidal intent.
According to Akinyemi, “The Nigerian reality reflects the same pattern—mass killings, government complicity through silence, occupation of ancestral lands, and the destruction of faith-based identity.”
A Call for International Accountability
In its conclusion, the brief declares that all five elements of Article II of the Genocide Convention are satisfied in Nigeria’s context: killings, serious bodily harm, life-destroying conditions, prevention of births, and the transfer of children.
Akinyemi calls on the United Nations to immediately establish an International Commission of Inquiry into Nigeria’s religious violence, urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) to exercise universal jurisdiction in prosecuting key actors responsible for atrocities.
Domestically, he urges the Nigerian government to enforce constitutional protections for life and religion under Sections 33 and 38 of the 1999 Constitution, and to adopt a National Genocide Remembrance Act to honor victims and institutionalize accountability.
“The world cannot claim ignorance,” the brief concludes. “The evidence is overwhelming. To continue in silence is to participate in the extermination of a people. After Rwanda, we said ‘Never Again.’ Yet, it is happening again—this time, in Nigeria.”
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