Signalfire

LAGOS, Nigeria — Nigeria’s federal police force kills with impunity, extorts those it’s charged to protect and rapes arrested prostitutes as a “fringe benefit” of the job, a report by a civil liberties group alleges.

The Open Society Justice Initiative’s report released Monday is the latest stain on Nigeria’s corrupt and maligned police force, which at its mildest merely demands bribes from motorists at roadblocks. At its worst, the report alleges the police rub chemical mace and hot chili pepper into the genitals of those it arrests, drawing out dubious confessions officers use as an excuse to summarily execute those they describe as “armed robbers.”

“The average police officer on the streets of Nigeria is armed with horse whip and many of them show considerable enthusiasm in using it on innocent passers-by without provocation,” the report from the Abuja, Nigeria-based organization reads. “Those who get away with merely being horsewhipped are considered lucky. Many others fare much worse.”

Police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu declined to immediately comment on the report Monday, saying he had not yet read it. However, he told The Associated Press in December that “extrajudicial killing is not approved in Nigeria” and that officers suspected of such killings are brought to justice.

The report draws a different conclusion. The group, supported by liberal financier George Soros’ foundation, said it based its findings on field monitoring and investigations at more than 400 police stations and posts visited from February 2007 to January 2009.

The group found police openly paraded alleged armed robbery suspects before local journalists before later executing them. The police used euphemisms for the slayings, saying the suspects would be “escorted,” sent out on an “errand” or “transferred to” Nigeria’s capital Abuja, the report claims.

The report alleges officers called the soon-to-be dead suspects “rams” or “bush meat.” The police investigations typically employed torture to draw out confessions. The officers drove nails into suspects’ hands or heads, shoved pins into the genitals or hung suspects upside down in a method referred to as “suicide,” the report claims.

Asked about suspects’ rights, the report says one officer in Adamawa State said: “We have seen pastors, imams, and highly placed and respected citizens who are pure criminals, pure criminals! And you people say they are innocent?”

Officers also used nightly prostitute roundups as a means to barter sex from those who couldn’t pay as little as $6 for their release, the report claims. The report describes officers even raping women who came to report crimes at police stations.

“This is one of the fringe benefits attached to night patrol,” the report quotes one officer assigned to a police station in a Lagos neighborhood as saying.

The report also claims officers, both male and female, sodomized women with bottles and metal pipes.

Allegations of brutality are nothing new for Nigeria’s police force, which is controlled from the federal level. In December, an Amnesty International report alleged that police kill hundreds of people in so-called extrajudicial slayings each year with few consequences. A video broadcast in February by international news channel Al-Jazeera apparently showed police officers executing unarmed prisoners in the wake of clashes last year with Muslim militants in northern Nigeria.

Nigeria’s new president, Goodluck Jonathan, has pledged to increase security for the West African nation’s 150 million residents. To do that, he must first address a police force that hires the unqualified and untrained to become officers, said Chidi Odinkalu, the director of the Open Society Justice Initiative’s Africa program.

Jonathan also must reform the agency before the coming 2011 presidential election, Odinkalu said, as the nation’s wealthy political elite hire more than a fourth of its officers as private security guards. Those elites often use the officers as enforcers to stuff ballot boxes and intimidate voters, he said.

“If he doesn’t do it, every other person in the political system will look to appropriate the police for his benefit,” Odinkalu said. “They need the police to rig elections.”

MEXICO CITY – Killings of gays and lesbians have risen in Mexico despite a government tolerance campaign and a law legalizing same-sex marriage in the capital, according to a report released Thursday by a coalition of civic groups.

A review of more than 70 newspapers in 11 Mexican states found an average of nearly 30 killings a year motivated by homophobia between 1995 and 2000, compared to nearly 60 a year between 2001 and 2009, the report said.

Ricardo Bucio, president of the government’s National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination, backed the report, saying it gave visibility to a lingering problem.

The government launched a radio campaign in 2005 to promote tolerance of homosexuals.

In December, the Mexico City legislature approved the first law in Latin America explicitly giving gay marriages the same status as heterosexual ones. The legislation, affecting only the capital, also allows same-sex couples to adopt children.

Mexico City’s annual gay pride parade draws tens of thousands of people, and in some neighborhoods gays openly hold hands.

But violence against gays seems to have increased as more become public about their sexual orientation, said Alejandro Brito, director of Letter S, one of the groups that released the report.

Mexico City had the most homophobia-motivated killings, with 144 between 1995 and 2009, according to the report.

Despite the federal government’s push to promote tolerance, President Felipe Calderon’s conservative administration campaigned against the Mexico City law allowing same-sex marriage.

Police fired tear gas and arrested at least 12 people as opponents of Lithuania’s first gay pride parade threw stones and fireworks at marchers.

Hundreds of people took part in the march in the capital, Vilnius.

Holding rainbow flags and dancing to music, they paraded along a road near the city’s Neris river.

The event, originally allowed by the city council, was banned by a court on security concerns, but on Friday an appeals court overturned the ban.

The ban was criticised by President Dalia Grybauskaite, some European governments, and the international rights watchdog Amnesty.

‘Step towards tolerance’

Hundreds of police officers, some on horses, provided security and kept more than 1,000 demonstrators away from the marchers.

Protesters carried crosses and signs, and shouted insults at march participants.

Marchers included many foreigners, diplomats and members of the European Parliament.

One of the organisers, Vytautas Valentinavicius, told the AFP news agency: “We’ve made a decisive step towards greater tolerance.”

Correspondents say that homosexuality is seen as taboo by many in Lithuania, a majority Roman Catholic country.

Lithuania, an EU member since 2004, has repeatedly been criticised by rights groups for widespread intolerance toward sexual minorities.

GUATEMALA CITY – Some 708 women were killed in Guatemala in 2009, based on Interior Ministry figures released on Saturday. Read more…

26 July
The placards held aloft by the elderly marchers in Bilbao’s Albia Gardens are neatly matched, each with an identically sized photograph in a green frame on a painted wooden stick. Some 50 protesters walk slowly in two disciplined lines under the towering plane trees of this well-tended city centre square. They are mostly stern-faced women, though one old man has a black Basque beret stretched across a balding head. It is a peaceful protest, largely ignored by the office workers and shoppers resting on the square’s benches. The faces on the placards, however, are a reminder of violence. They are the faces of Eta – the Basque separatist group that has killed 800 people in bombings and shootings over the past four decades. Read more…

A new report says that more than 100,000 Americans under the age of 18 are victims of sex trafficking in the United States. While the illicit sex trade is often considered a scourge of the developing world, experts told lawmakers on Capitol Hill Tuesday that it is also a serious problem in the United States. Read more…

Troy, Virginia – (AP) For more than a year, Virginia’s largest women’s prison rounded up inmates who had loose-fitting clothes, short hair, or otherwise masculine looks, sending them to a unit officers derisively dubbed the “butch wing,” prisoners and guards say. Read more…