Nigeria Says It Will Amend Law Under Which It Executed Activists

Under international pressure for its human rights policies, Nigeria has promised to amend the law under which writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others acting on behalf of the Ogoni people were convicted and hanged in November.

The West African nation has also agreed to immediately review all cases of detention without trial under a 1984 decree and to examine whether ecological and environmental problems affect the Ogoni area, an oil-producing region of southeastern Nigeria.

Nigeria’s consent to these and some other recommendations of a recent U.N. fact-finding mission was contained in a letter dated Tuesday to Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from Auwalu Hamisu Yadudu, special advisor on legal matters to Nigerian leader Gen. Sani Abacha.

The letter was an interim response to the U.N. mission’s report, given to Abacha this month by U.N. emissary Lakhdar Brahimi.

Both documents have been sent to the president of the General Assembly, which in December overwhelmingly condemned Nigeria’s “arbitrary execution, after a flawed judicial process,” of Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues for involvement in the 1994 killings of four pro-government tribal chiefs.

The executions led to Nigeria’s suspension from the Commonwealth, which groups Britain and former colonies, and to arms embargoes and other punitive measures by the European Union and the United States.

But the U.N. fact-finding mission, which also looked into the Nigerian military government’s promise to restore democratic rule, recommended against U.N. sanctions, saying that “at this stage [they] may prove unhelpful and retard the progress toward positive improvement.”

In his letter, Yadudu said the law under which the nine activists were hanged will be changed to exclude members of the military from serving on the judicial panel. Verdicts and sentences of those convicted under the law will be “subject to judicial review at appellate level.”