Two officials signed a Memorandum in Abuja on 26 March 2026 supporting Nigeria’s investigation and prosecution of alleged serious international crimes in its own courts. Four months later, Human Rights Watch reported more than 500 defendants in one trial phase and about 600 in the next, while describing a docket dominated by low-level suspects and focused primarily on non-state actors. No defendant arising from the southeast deaths examined here was located in the public record reviewed.
Deputy Prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang signed for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Attorney-General Lateef Olasunkanmi Fagbemi SAN signed for the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The Memorandum of Understanding concluded between them on 26 March 2026 records that Nigeria carries primary responsibility for investigating and prosecuting alleged serious international crimes before its own courts, and that the Office will supply continued encouragement and technical and strategic assistance while it does so [Documented].
Under complementarity, a case is generally inadmissible before the Court when the same case is being genuinely investigated or prosecuted by a state with jurisdiction. Subject to the Statute’s other admissibility requirements, it may be admissible where relevant national proceedings are absent or where the state is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry them out. The March 2026 arrangement therefore rests on something checkable: whether domestic proceedings are reaching the conduct, and the people, an international forum would otherwise reach [Documented + Inference].
Human Rights Watch tested that premise four months later and published the count. The ninth phase of Nigeria’s terrorism trials opened on 8 April 2026 with more than 500 defendants and the tenth on 15 June with about 600. Low-level suspects accused of offenses connected to material support dominated the docket, prosecution of those most responsible was not being prioritized, and the proceedings had yet to demonstrate willingness and ability to address serious international crimes attributed to the Nigerian security forces [Documented].
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Set that against the events this volume examines. Between December 2015 and September 2017, the register records four alleged-force incidents and one later recovery event in Abia and Anambra States. No charge against security-force personnel arising from any entry was located in the public record reviewed. Soldiers shot five people at Onitsha in December 2015. A gathering at Aba National High School was surrounded in February 2016 and live ammunition was fired without prior warning, and four days later thirteen bodies came out of a pit beside the Aba highway, some identified by witnesses as men the military had taken away. Troops entered the compound of St Edmund’s Catholic Church at Nkpor in May 2016 where people were sleeping, and in September 2017 a group of men was forced into muddy water on the Aba–Umuahia road and beaten with canes [Documented].
Those findings come from Amnesty International, published in June and November 2016, and from contemporaneous Nigerian reporting of the September 2017 operation carried by Premium Times, TheCable and TVC News. An aggregate sits above them: at least 150 killed by security forces at pro-Biafra gatherings in the year to August 2016, of whom at least 60 died around Biafra Remembrance Day on 30 May [Documented].
Plate 13. The documented minimum of at least 150 deaths, the subset of at least 60 within it, and the thirteen bodies recovered at Aba, none of the three added to another.
Ten years have passed since the earliest of those incidents. A search completed on 28 August 2026 located no charge against any member of the security forces arising from any of them [Documented + Inference].
What is absent from the record is as specific as what is present. The searches located no coroner’s inquest into any of the deaths, no court-martial convened over any of the incidents, and no board of inquiry finding. Nothing showed that a family at Aba received an official statement of how a relative in that pit died [Documented + Inference].
Nigeria is not incapable of prosecuting deaths arising from public demonstrations. Kaduna State charged 177 members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria over the death of Corporal Dan Kaduna Yakubu, the only soldier among the 349 dead reported in public summaries of the state commission’s findings [Documented]. Prosecutorial capacity exists, and it has been directed. Where it has been directed is the subject of Volume I and the comparator for everything that follows here [Inference].
A word on the masthead. The strap above every installment names the umbrella series, which examines two official records: the deaths and burials that occurred while Tukur Buratai commanded the Nigerian Army, and the United States investigative file concerning President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Zaria, Mando and the killings of 2015 to 2020 were the subject of Volume I. This volume deals with the southeast and with the international forum, and the American file belongs to Volume III.
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Why the question travels abroad
Non-prosecution is not an empty space in a legal system. It is a set of decisions taken by identifiable officials, and those decisions carry consequences the decision-makers do not control. Where relevant domestic proceedings are absent, the Rome Statute may provide a forum if territorial, temporal and subject-matter jurisdiction, gravity and the remaining admissibility requirements are satisfied. Whether the southeast operations satisfy those conditions is a question of law and evidence, and the five installments that follow work through it without assuming the answer.
What the March 2026 agreement did and did not decide
When the Memorandum was announced, the Office had not sought authorization to open an investigation and was publicly emphasizing domestic proceedings. No application seeking authorization to investigate the Nigeria situation was located in the Court record reviewed as of 28 August 2026. The public material does not establish a blanket endorsement of Nigeria’s courts or a final decision never to investigate [Documented + Inference].
The retrieved public material does not describe the Memorandum as an Article 18 deferral, and no Article 18 notification or deferral decision was located. This file therefore treats it as a complementarity agreement and not as a formal Article 18 process [Documented + Inference].
Plate 14. The Nigeria file at The Hague from the conclusion of the preliminary examination in December 2020 to the assessment of Nigeria’s domestic trials in July 2026.
The limit of what can be said about that agreement
Boko Haram, the Islamic State in West Africa Province, and members of the Nigerian Armed Forces are the actors named in the Office’s public statement about the Memorandum. The full instrument was not retrieved for this review. Its precise territorial and factual scope, including whether it expressly reaches or excludes the southeast operations, cannot be stated [Documented + Inference].
What can be stated is narrower and still consequential. When the preliminary examination was concluded on 11 December 2020, the potential cases the Office identified concerned the conflict in the north-east. The southeast forms no part of them [Documented].
What this volume does not assert
Three propositions stay outside this volume. Guilt is not attributed to any named person, jurisdiction is not treated as settled, and no death by drowning is alleged in the water on the Aba–Umuahia road. Proof for any of them is absent from this file, and advancing one without proof would give every defender of the record a reason to discard the rest.
Consequential propositions carry Documented, Alleged, Inference or Documented plus Inference, placed at the end of the proposition classified. Records that could not be retrieved appear under a heading of their own, and nothing is inferred from them in either direction.
Where this file reports that no record was located, the statement describes the result of a defined search and nothing more. That search covered publicly accessible web sources, the published output of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Criminal Court, Nigerian news reporting available online, and the public websites of Nigerian federal institutions, with a cut-off of 28 August 2026. No nationwide publicly searchable docket covering the relevant civil and military proceedings was located, no register of Nigerian court-martial proceedings open to public search was located, and military operational records are not routinely published. A record may therefore exist that this search could not reach, and no statement here converts an absence from the public record into a finding that a thing never happened [Documented + Inference].
Five installments follow, in the order adopted by this investigation. The first examines Operation Egwu Eke II and the September 2017 footage, and the second assembles the register and tests what recurrence can prove. Article 7 is then worked through element by element, each marked established, contested or unproved. Separating the modes of liability comes next, because naming an officer without identifying how he is said to be liable names nobody. The last sets out the route to The Hague and the conditions governing it.
The weakness, named at the outset
Article 7 of the Rome Statute requires no armed conflict, which is why it governs here and why the war-crimes route is not pleaded. It does require a State or organizational policy under Article 7(2)(a), and that element is where this case is thin. Repetition of the same conduct across years, states and units does not by itself prove policy. Part 3 states that plainly and identifies the documents that would close the gap.
Zaria is not pleaded as part of the southeast course of conduct. No common policy connecting Kaduna in December 2015 to Abia in September 2017 has been established, and joining them would import a weakness into a case that stands better apart. Zaria appears in this volume for four purposes: notice to senior authorities, comparison of investigative and disciplinary responses, complementarity and domestic inactivity, and the demonstration of selective enforcement.
Evidence Docket
DOCUMENTARY RECORD
Amnesty International. (2016, June 10). Nigeria: Killing of unarmed pro-Biafra supporters by military must be urgently investigated.
Amnesty International. (2016, November 24). Nigeria: At least 150 peaceful pro-Biafra activists killed in chilling crackdown.
Human Rights Watch. (2018, December 12). Nigeria: End impunity for killings of Shia.
Human Rights Watch. (2026, July 22). Nigeria: Boko Haram trials ineffective, flawed.
International Criminal Court. (2026, March 30). ICC Deputy Prosecutor concludes mission to Nigeria, signing a Memorandum of Understanding to enhance complementarity.
United States Department of State. (2017). Nigeria 2016 human rights report.
PRIMARY AUTHORITIES
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, arts. 7, 8, 11, 12(2)(a), 15, 17, 18.
Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), s. 12(1).
International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber. (2025, June 16). Decision on a request to compel the Prosecution to seek authorisation to open an investigation in relation to Nigeria, ICC-ROC46(3)-01/24-5.
RECORDS NOT RETRIEVED
Report of the Kaduna State Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the clashes between the Nigerian Army and members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, Zaria, 12–14 December 2015, in complete form. The figures used here are taken from public summaries of its findings and from Human Rights Watch (2018, December 12).
Memorandum of Understanding between the Office of the Prosecutor and the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 26 March 2026, full text. Its territorial and factual scope is not stated in this volume, and nothing here turns on an assumption about what it covers.
Right of reply: no advance notice was given. Any person or institution named in this investigation may respond after publication. A substantive response will be published, and any demonstrated factual error will be corrected. The channel is published with the work and remains open for as long as this entry stands on the register. Lieutenant General Tukur Yusufu Buratai (retd.), the Nigerian Army, the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation, and every other institution named in this volume may respond to any matter reported in it. Responses may be sent to [email protected] and will be published in full alongside the relevant installment, with any disputed fact identified as disputed at the point where it appears.
