Viet Nam Human Rights
Ending the Unthinkable Injustice of Human Chaining
9/4/20
When Akanni's mother died in early 2018, she stopped eating for three weeks. Her mood became unpredictable; she was often shouting or sulking angrily. Medicine from a local pharmacist didn't help. At a loss for what to do to handle the trauma, Akanni's father took her to a church in Abeokuta, Ogun state, in Nigeria. And then he left her there.
The evangelist in the church chained her in a room, where she was left on a bare floor for three days straight with no food or water. She stayed there with a man who was going through a mental health crisis. She felt alone. The staff gave Akanni a pot to urinate and defecate in, right in front of the man.
Akanni is still imprisoned in the church. She is deprived of food and water every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until 6 p.m. The staff at church claim this is for fasting purposes as part of her treatment. When she resists, they chain her again.
"Sometimes if they say I should fast and I drink water or take food, they put me on chain," she told our researchers. "The chaining is punishment. I have been put on chain so many times, I can't count."
Akanni is not alone. Human Rights Watch documented that thousands of people with actual or perceived mental health conditions across Nigeria are chained and locked up in various facilities, including state-owned rehabilitation centers, psychiatric hospitals, and faith-based and traditional healing centers.
Many are shackled with iron chains, around one or both ankles, to heavy objects or to other detainees, in some cases for months or years.
Chaining is a global human rights issue. Human Rights Watch has documented its use in numerous countries, including Indonesia, Ghana, Somaliland, and most recently Nigeria.
Like Akanni, people cannot leave these facilities, and are confined in overcrowded, unhygienic conditions, and forced to sleep, eat, and defecate within the same confined place. Many are physically and emotionally abused and forced to take questionable treatments.
People are chained for a range of reasons: when they behave outside what's considered "the norm," are going through trauma or grief, or even for getting upset. Like Akanni, who never had access to mental health professionals before her father abandoned her at the church, most Nigerians are unable to get adequate mental health services or support in their communities and rely on traditional and religious healers for support.
Stigma and misunderstanding, specifically ideas that mental health conditions are caused by evil spirits or supernatural forces, drive relatives to take their loved ones anywhere the relatives think their loved ones could get help.
Signs of light are appearing. In October, President Muhammadu Buhari denounced chaining as torture, and the Nigerian police carried out raids in Islamic rehabilitation centers in the northern part of the country. Although the Nigerian Constitution prohibits torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment, the government has yet to outlaw chaining people with mental health conditions. The government has also yet to acknowledge that chaining is happening in government-run facilities as well as traditional and other religious centers that are not Islamic.
Today, as the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to end this practice, free people from chains, and ban shackling.
Banning chaining is just the first step. It's also necessary to monitor and meaningfully enforce the ban. Further, it's essential to prioritize providing psychosocial support and mental health services as close as possible to people's own communities.
Humane and accessible care need not be extraordinarily expensive. To give one example, cities and countries around the world are now following the Zimbabwean model of the "Friendship Bench," a community-led initiative that trains and supports older women to offer talk therapy and make connections to vital social services and mental health care.
Article 5 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is clear that "no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
But this is more than a violation of the law. When asked what's worst about being in the church, Akanni was unequivocal. "I feel lonely," she said. Chaining represents the most extreme imaginable denial of our fundamental human rights.
It strips people of the basic need to belong, connect with community, have a home, learn, express oneself, have agency. It's an affront to the essence of what makes us human.
Akanni told us she wants to go home, study accounting, get a job, and lead a healthy and joyful life. It's up to President Buhari, leaders and civil society in Nigeria, and all of us who can exert pressure around the world, to see that she and countless others have a meaningful chance to realize these dreams.
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All comments [ 20 ]
Human rights can help confront economic inequality, but four conceptual, normative, strategic and methodological challenges must be overcome
The worldwide pattern of growing disparity between rich and poor, and the steadily increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, is one of the critical public policy issues of our time and a defining feature of our global economic order.
The contributors to the debate so far are among the growing number of human rights thinkers and practitioners who are breaking this silence.
What, then, is the relationship between extreme economic inequality and human rights—an intrinsic injustice, an instrumental threat or an independent phenomenon?
Economic inequality is clearly a human rights concern where it can be shown to be a cause or consequence of human rights violations.
The link between rising inequality and economic and social rights abuses has come to the fore very clearly in the recent context of austerity and recession in many countries.
equality and non-discrimination norms also require states to redistribute resources in order to reduce disparities in human rights outcomes and ensure substantive equality for groups facing gender, racial or other forms of discrimination, including in the economic sphere.
Human rights standards contain a wealth of provisions regarding the determinants of economic inequality—that is, the policy interventions that most directly produce or contain it.
The roots of the current escalation in inequality lie in the erosion of labour rights, the undermining of public services and social protection systems, biased financial regulation and regressive fiscal policies skewed towards the better off, economic policies that discriminate against women and the capture of democratic decision-making by self-serving elites.
Human rights standards may not make explicit reference to economic inequality, yet they have much to say about the policies and practices that give rise to it.
Promoting respect for extraterritorial human rights duties in economic, tax and trade agreements would therefore be a fundamental step towards tackling structural global inequalities.
the human rights community has an important role to ensure that robust inequality-reduction programs are indeed implemented, and anchored in existing human rights and anti-discrimination commitments.
Human rights activists have a crucial role to play in nudging these institutions to play their accountability and governance functions more effectively.
Tracking economic inequalities, linking them to breaches of human rights obligations and seeking accountability and appropriate remedies can be methodologically challenging, as it requires engagement with tools of analysis and advocacy more familiar to economists and development practitioners than to human rights defenders.
Wealth is hemorrhaging upwards rather than trickling down.
It is absolute deprivation, not relative inequality, that is of intrinsic moral significance, human rights advocates on the ground cannot remain impervious to the ways in which state-sanctioned wealth concentration drives impoverishment.
If human rights are to be a countervailing force against the polarization being wrought by the dominant neoliberal economic paradigm, rather than a helpless bystander to it, their egalitarian potential needs to be more fully tapped.
As in previous eras, policies aimed at a more just distribution of resources can be put in place when there is sufficient social consensus and political will to do so.
Health workers should be aware that human rights norms, standards, laws, and accountability mechanisms are highly relevant tools that can enhance efforts to achieve social justice in health, both globally and within countries.
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