EXTRAJUDICIAL PUNISHMENT: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE.

Abstract

It cannot be gainsaid that the discourse on the issue of extrajudicial punishment has wrongly been conceived as a phenomenon limited to developing nations or Africa, which has unfortunately been described in some quarters as dark continent. As a matter of fact, the embarkation on this research has availed the work the opportunity to clear the air on this misconception. The objective of the study, therefore, is saddled with giving a detailed comparative account of this phenomenon from a global prism, and it is against this backdrop that the work argues the thesis that extrajudicial punishment or killing is not limited to Nigeria or Africa. It demonstrates that extrajudicial punishment is the act of punishing individuals presumed to have committed crime without due process. The horrendous act is perpetrated by agents of the administration of the criminal justice system namely, the police and prison authorities in their custodial centres. The study articulates a global perspective of extrajudicial punishment or killing so that in addressing this problem, all hands must be on deck globally in stemming this scourge from festering. Finding reveals that agents of the state and non state actors, namely the police, prisons and deadly vigilante/militia groups have been implicated from accounts of the successive reports of human rights activists as those behind these horrendous acts. As a result of this denigrating treatment of torture, several inmates and detainees alike have lost their lives through this reprehensible act. The outcome of the study shows several accounts of extrajudicial punishment and how extrajudicial punishment can lead to extrajudicial killing if not checkmated. It is in the light of this, the work explicates that extrajudicial killing, as an act that is morally and legally condemnable, is not limited to Nigeria, hence, a global phenomenon.