President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been called upon to come to the rescue of Professors serving in Nigerian universities and other asylum seekers detained in neighbouring Republic of Cameroon.
A former member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Abdul Oroh, who made the call on behalf of the detainees stressed the need for the President Tinubu-led administration to employ diplomatic and political measures to achieve the objective.
Oroh, a lawyer and a rights activist who submitted a petition before the House of Representatives Committee on Public Petitions on behalf of the detainees made this known while addressing journalists in Abuja.
This just as another lawyer, Mr. Joseph Fru who expressed concern over the plight of the detainees in prisons for over five years, insisted that they are law-abiding citizens, and not criminals as alleged by Cameroonian authorities.
The duo lamented the absence of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Cameroonian High Commissioner, the UNHCR Coordinator, the Attorney-General of the Federation, and representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at meeting of the House Committee on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
They expressed worry that the repeated non-appearance of key representatives from both Nigeria and Cameroon at the Committees sittings significantly stalled the fate of the professors and others jailed in Cameroon.
The Cameroonian refugee Professors and professionals were arrested at Nera Hotel in Abuja on January 5, 2018 by security agents and later repatriated to Cameroon, tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment, at the Kondengui Maximum security detention facility.
The asylum seekers in Nigeria in their petition, pleaded with the House to among others cause the government of Nigeria to institute an urgent action to secure the implementation of Communication 59/2022 of 14th October 2022 of the UN-HRC-WGAD calling for their release.
They also prayed the House to cause the Nigerian Government of to take action and implement the rulings in the three judgments of the Federal High Court of Abuja in 2019, ordering the release and compensation of these petitioners.
Oroh maintained that the detainees, were apprehended while in the custody of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) of Nigeria and subsequently transferred to Cameroon.
“We realise that these people were not detained under the administration of Bola Tinubu. Bola Tinubu is a human rights person. He was a former exile, a former refugee in another country who was running away from tyranny. He fought tyranny and defeated tyranny.
“Now there is hope renewed so we want that hope that is renewed to engage our neighbours, to touch the lives of our neighbours especially these my clients. We want him to intervene with the Cameronian authorities to release them,” he had say.
On his part, Fru maintained that despite legal rulings condemning their abduction and deportation as arbitrary and illegal, the illegal detainees remained in appalling conditions.
He stressed the importance of the officials involved to present to provide their side of the story, emphasising the need for transparency in the matter.
The lawyer had insisted that the detainees were were abducted and not arrested was being reported, saying; “When you say someone is arrested, there is a legal course for them to be picked up by the forces of law and order. apprehension.
“But when someone arbitrarily without any legal course is picked up and then held for as long as they were held in Nigeria before being sent to Cameron that is called an abduction.
“The second thing is that they were not repatriated. You repatriate someone when you go through a legal channel and you exhaust all the legal processes and the court decides that they go back to where they came from to answer in that jurisdiction.”
