AN APPRAISAL OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE UNDER THE ROME STATUTE: THE KILLING OF CHRISTIANS IN NORTHERN NIGERIA REVISITED

Abstract

The characterization of the sustained killing of Christian communities in Northern Nigeria as ‘genocide’ has become a recurring feature of advocacy literature, diplomatic correspondence, and popular commentary, yet the term carries a precise and demanding legal meaning under Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the 1948 Genocide Convention from which it derives. This article undertakes a doctrinal appraisal of whether the pattern of violence attributed to Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and armed Fulani militia across Nigeria's Middle Belt and North-eastern states satisfies both the actus reus and, more contentiously, the special intent that genocide requires. Drawing on the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Akayesu, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Krstić, and the International Criminal Court's own vacillation over the genocide count in the Al Bashir proceedings, the article situates the Nigerian situation within comparative international criminal law before examining why the Office of the Prosecutor's 2020 conclusion of its decade-long preliminary examination found a reasonable basis for crimes against humanity and war crimes but stopped short of genocide. It argues that the evidentiary and institutional obstacles to a genocide finding are compounded by Nigeria's continued non domestication of the Rome Statute and by the Court's apparent deferral to domestic proceedings in 2026, and it concludes by proposing legislative and prosecutorial reforms capable of closing the accountability gap regardless of how the genocide question is ultimately resolved.