A former member of the House of Representatives, Hon Abdul Oroh, has reiterated for the umpteenth time the call on President Bola Tinubu-led federal government to employ diplomatic and political measures to ensure the release of professors in some Nigerian universities and other professionals jailed in Cameroon.
Also, another lawyer to the detainees, Joseph Fru, has said their clients had been languishing in Cameroonian prisons for over five years, insisting they are law-abiding citizens, not criminals.
Oroh, a lawyer at FRULAW Chambers: Barristers, Solicitors, Public Notaries of the Cameroon Bar Association, which tendered a petition currently before the House of Representatives Committee on Public Petitions, made a case for their release when he addressed journalists in Abuja.
The detainees’ lawyers bemoaned 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 a meeting of the House Committee on Tuesday.
They expressed worry that the repeated non-appearance of key representatives from both Nigeria and Cameroon at the Committee’s 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.
In their petition, the asylum seekers in Nigeria pleaded with the House to, among other things, cause the government of Nigeria to institute urgent action to secure the implementation of Communication 59/2022 of October 14 2022 of the UN-HRC-WGAD calling for their release.
They also prayed to the House to cause the Nigerian government to take action and implement the rulings in the three judgements of the Federal High Court of Abuja in 2019, ordering the release and compensation of these petitioners.
Speaking further on the matter, 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 to engage our neighbours and touch the lives of our neighbours, especially these my clients. We want him to intervene with the Cameroonian authorities to release them,” he said.
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 presenting their side of the story, emphasising the need for transparency in the matter.
The lawyer had insisted that the detainees were abducted and not arrested, 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.
“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 Cameroon, that is called an abduction.
“The second thing is that they were not repatriated. When you go through a legal channel, you repatriate someone, 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.”
