TORTURE DEHUMANIZES REVEREND KING

TORTURE DEHUMANIZES REVEREND KING

BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU

 

A Legal source has advanced a serious but incisive argument that the Lagos state government will need to take another look at before executing the contents of the charge sheet  on the death sentence soon to be carried out on Reverend King ..

whose real names are Chukwuemeka Ezeugo.

In an exclusive chat with The News office Desk of Paedia Express Multimedia  Group in Lagos,Nigeria ,a lawyer has suggested that the" awaiting -execution"order from the state leadership on the accused has placed the latter on an enormous mental torture which is a direct abuse of his fundamental human rights.

He lamented that it pretty difficult to predict the duration of a case under the nation's criminal justice system saying that there were several inmates on death row who had spent 10 years just waiting for the hangman to strike once and for all.

He stopped short of asking the state to commute Reverend King's death sentence to life  imprisonment but was quick to add the fact that the clergy had already spent five calendar years in prison presumably under very difficult conditions thus strengthening the arguments of mental torture in the spiritualists favor.

The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (commonly known as the United Nations Convention against Torture) is an international human rights treaty, under the review of the United Nations, that aims to prevent torture and other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment around the world.
The Convention requires states to take effective measures to prevent torture in any territory under their jurisdiction, and forbids states to transport people to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured.
The text of the Convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1984^[1] and, following ratification by the 20th state party,^[3] it came into force on 26 June 1987.^[1] 26 June is now recognized as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, in honor of the Convention. Since the convention's entry into force, the absolute prohibition against torture and other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment has become accepted as a principle of customary international law.^[6] As of February 2017, the Convention has 161 state parties.^[1]

For the purpose of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions.