NHRC Records Grimmest Rights Violations, Receives 261,483 Complaints

The National Human Rights Commission received over 261,483 human rights violation complaints in April 2025, the highest number in the last year since it started publishing its monthly dashboard report.

Executive Secretary of the Commission, Dr. Tony Ojukwu, who revealed this at the weekend during April’s 2025 Human Rights Situation Dashboard Report in Abuja, also lamented that April witnessed an upsurge in human rights violations, citing the wanton killings in the middle belt by bandits and militia groups as a major factor.

Ojukwu said the dashboard presentation is not merely a data exercise but a call to the collective conscience, adding that the figures shared reflect the lived experiences of citizens who demand not only everyone’s attention but also our urgent action.

“Our Observatory has documented alarming trends, widespread human rights violations, forced displacements, and unchecked violence, particularly in conflict-affected states of the country. Our Human Rights Situation in April was the grimmest we have seen in almost a year. The killings in Plateau and Benue States, as well as the resurgence of the attacks by Boko Haram and ISWAP in Borno state, have left hundreds of citizens dead and injured“, he lamented.

While stressing that the crisis in the middle belt of Nigeria is not new, insisting that it has persisted with decades of bloodshed and a national discourse which he said seemed to be treating these atrocities with negligence, the senior advocate warned that this must not be allowed to continue. He added that we must collectively resist the normalisation of the horrors that play out when families are slaughtered in their sleep, as well as when children are laid to rest in shallow graves and survivors left without shelter, support, or justice.

The human rights defender who argued that Nigeria is a signatory to international human rights instruments and has also enacted constitutional provisions and laws protecting the human person, also insisted that the country must honour its national and international obligations to protect and fulfil the right to life and the right to the dignity of the human person.

He further reiterated that silence in the face of injustice is complicity, adding that every failure to name these violations, to investigate them, and to hold perpetrators accountable represents a betrayal of our national and moral responsibilities.

It will be recalled that since January 2024, the NHRC, in partnership with UNDP, OHCHR and GANHRI, has produced a monthly dashboard on the human rights situation in Nigeria. The current human rights violations recorded in April have about 570 killings, 278 kidnappings, as well as 1121 cases of child abandonment and 7 cases of killing of security personnel.