The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said it received a total of 169,850 complaints in the month of January 2025 showing a significant decrease from the previous months.
Speaking on Friday in Abuja during the presentation of the human rights situation dashboard for January 2025, the Executive Secretary of the Commission, Dr Tony Ojukwu (SAN) said, the rising wave of human rights violations in Nigeria calls for a national emergency.
He said, “With 169,850 complaints recorded by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in January 2025 alone, the country is grappling with widespread insecurity, systemic injustices, and an alarming surge in domestic and sexual abuse cases”.
Ojukwu said, while Boko Haram resurges in the North-Eastern region of the country, banditry thrives in the North-West, and violence escalates in the South-East, with the crisis extending beyond armed conflicts.
He said cases of sexual, domestic violence, and gender-based crimes are rising at an unprecedented rate, exposing the failures of law enforcement and the justice system.
Presenting the January human rights situation dashboard, the Senior Human Rights Adviser to the Executive Secretary, Mr. Hilary Ogbonna stated that there was more than one hundred percent decrease in complaints from December 2024 to January 2025.
According to the Senior Human Rights Adviser, the January 2025 dashboard showed that child abandonment was the highest in terms of violations across the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria, followed by killings.
Across the thematic areas, he said, violations against law enforcement agents and human dignity were the highest while spousal abandonment was top in violations against women.
He said, Borno was the topmost State in the number of killings of 69, and other issues in focus, include killing of military and law enforcement personnel, extrajudicial killings as well as death by communal clashes and death by accident.
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