Briefing prepared for UK parliamentarians in January 2025.
Nigeria’s Federal Constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion and guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief to all citizens, including the right to change religion or belief. The nation is also party to international agreements that guarantee freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) and non-discrimination, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which it acceded in 1993.
However, violations of the right to FoRB have occurred for several decades in the north, arising mainly from the marginalisation of minority faith communities dating back to the colonial era. A longstanding impunity surrounding religion-related violence has created an enabling environment for the regular emergence of extremist religious sects and armed factions with an antipathy to FoRB. Nigeria is also one of 71 countries that criminalises blasphemy in a colonial era law that is incompatible with the country’s national and international obligations.
Abductions by armed non-state actors
Nigerian citizens are experiencing terror attacks by a plethora of armed non-state actors for whom religion and/ or ethnicity are either instrumentalised as rallying points, or are foundational to their existence. Some ultimately seek to enforce their extreme religious dogma on wider society.
Based in the northeast, the terrorist franchises Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) continue campaigns of abduction and murder, as does the al Qaeda affiliate Ansaru in the northwest. Since 2020, all of these terrorist factions in the north have made inroads into central Nigeria through alliances with irregular armed groups comprising members of Fulani ethnicity, including a militia operating in central Nigeria which in 2022 announced its presence in the south with an attack in Ondo State on St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church by assailants identified by survivors as Fulanis. It was the first terror attack on a church in the region, and its perpetrators are yet to be brought to justice.
More recently Lukarawa, a terrorist faction whose capabilities had been degraded by the military in 2020, regrouped in 2023 and has developed a presence in 10 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in the northwestern states of Sokoto and Kebbi. The faction is reportedly affiliated to established terrorist groups operating in the Sahel, and its members communicate in Hausa, the Fulani language Fulfude, and Arabic.
A key element of the violence of all the armed insurgents is the abduction of women and girls, who are subsequently subjected to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). ‘A credible source within both Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and Boko Haram put the number of other nameless women and girls currently held captive by terrorists at between 300 to 400. These girls were abducted from their communities, their farms, or while travelling on roads. They include both Christians and Muslims taken mainly across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States, most of whom are young girls. […] The abduction of girls and other women by terrorist factions in northern Nigeria has highlighted how women are objectified in the overall plans of these insurgents. […] Some are killed, some are turned into slaves, and others are used as suicide bombers.’