The Federal Government has faulted the ethnic profiling of the Nigerian inmates released under the Transfer of Sentenced Persons Agreement with Ethiopia.
NPO Reported that the FG through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, had last week secured the release of over 50 inmates at the Aba Samuel prison and Kaliti prison in Ethiopia.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry agreed to repatriate the inmates back to Nigeria where they are to continue their prison term.
However, the release of the inmates had sparked mixed reactions from members of the public with some alleging that inmates are predominantly from the Southeast region who were accused of painting the image of the country on bad light abroad.
Reacting to the ethnic profiling of the inmates, Odumegwu-Ojukwu, in a statement issued on Friday by Dr Magnus Eze, her Special Assistant on Communication and New Media, jettisoned allegation that the inmates are from one region of the country.
She stated that crime has no ethnicity or tribe.
The minister also dismissed concerns by some people thinking the inmates would be freed upon return into the country.
According to her, one of the provisions of the memorandum of understanding between both countries is the undertaking not to grant pardon or amnesty for the person requested to be transferred, without the consent of the sentencing state.
“The list trending online is a made-up list. We don’t have 136 inmates in Aba Samuel and Kaliti prisons. Those that are subject of this agreement, transfer of sentenced persons, are 98 inmates of that prison.
“A lot of them are from the Southeast. There are also those from the Southwest, from the South-South: crime has no ethnicity. All these people are Nigerian citizens in a foreign jail,” she said.
Meanwhile, Odumegwu-Ojukwu said the transfer of the inmates is in line with the citizen diplomacy framework of the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu.
She said the important diplomatic milestone which placed priority on the Nigerian diaspora was in efforts to intervene in the cases of Nigerians imperiled in other parts of the world.
The minister further dismissed purported list circulating in various media platforms about names and numbers of Nigerian inmates in Ethiopia prisons as fake, insisting Nigeria did not have 136 inmates in that country.
She also noted that some of the crimes attributed to the inmates are wild tangent, saying government is determined to bring the inmates home to serve their sentences with dignity and without exposing them to inhuman conditions.
According to her, efforts had been made for many years to get the prisoners back home to Nigeria, amid difficulties to get the actual numbers of the inmates in Ethiopia.
The minister mentioned that the inmates were spread across Kaliti prisons and Aba Samuel prisons that are maximum security prisons, stressing that there was need to sign the agreement on transfer of sentenced persons.
“Essentially, if prisoners have been sentenced in one country and they are serving a jail term in that country, they can return to their state or country of origin, to serve out the sentence.
“This is important because the inmates in those prisons have been agitating for so many years, to return back to Nigeria to complete their jail terms.
“This is in view of their precarious living conditions, health challenges, inadequate medical facilities, poor feeding, denial of visitation rights, they didn’t have adequate legal services and language barrier among other things.” Odumegwu-Ojukwu said
She reiterated four Nigerian prisoners had died in the space of time it took for both countries to finalise the agreement.
“Some of these young people that I saw when I went into that prison could have been anybody’s brother. So, should they be faced with such a precarious situation for one mistake,” the minister queried.