The National human rights commission (NHRC) received 1,223 complaints on child abandonment in December 2024.
The figure was given by the senior human rights adviser to the Commission Mr Hilary Ogbonna at the presentation of the December dashboard report prepared by the commission.
The dashboard showed that the commission received a total of 355,726 complaints of human rights violations in December.
” We are trying to complete a forum a policy and action forum that will look at this from a multi-sectoral and government-wide approach .
” We hope that in this union we are able with support of pastors to organise that policy forum on child abandonment but from what we know from our state offices a lot of them are attributed to the current economic situation in the country.
” However, the commission is of the opinion that there is no justification to abandoning a child or a family there can be no justification .
” Having noted that , we continue to call on authorities to establish social welfare mechanism that would require or recognise that children are at the heart of our future.
” The mechanism is to protect these children, offer them temporal shelter, protection even while they are abandoned ” he said.
Ogbonna said child abandonment is the foundation for the violation of multiple child rights .
He pointed out that when a child is abandoned , that child is exposed to violence and possible child marriage.
” The child will not have access to good nutrition , so abandonment should not just be seen as a single event of a father or a mother abandoning a child or children but rather a foundation for multiple human rights violations.
The dashboard is a monthly analysis and graphical presentation of human rights situation in Nigeria while the Observatory is for monitoring, reporting and analysing the human rights violations.
