Opinion
By Mike Arnold
THE UN just released a report from a twelve-day Nigeria “investigation” by its Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. Finding: no evidence of religious persecution.
One detail sets the table: the Rapporteur was there at the invitation of the Nigerian government.
The Rapporteur’s reasoning: she did not see a direct government order to kill Christians. No instruction from Abuja, up and down the chain of command, ordering one religious group destroyed. Therefore — not genocide. Not persecution. Move along.
The problem is, that is NOT the legal standard. That is a red herring. Disgusting.
In 1994, Hutu militias — not the Rwandan military, not a government chain of command — killed 800,000 Tutsi in 100 days. The International Criminal Tribunal ruled it genocide. The killers didn’t have government memos in their pockets. They had machetes and a mission. Intent to destroy a group is the standard. Not a signed order.
The Rapporteur, Prof. Nazila Ghanea, holds a chair in international human rights law at Oxford University. She knows the legal standard for religious persecution and genocide. She chose intentionally to kick up dust with a false argument to justify her obviously pre-determined conclusion. That’s not an investigation, it’s a whitewash. This should be a crime.
Here’s what her twelve-day investigation looked like. She went to Abuja, Jos, and Kano — cities. Not to Barkin Ladi, not Benue, not Taraba or Southern Kaduna, not Gwoza, where the massacres continue. Her own statement confirmed her activities were “limited to Kano and Plateau states.” She met with government officials and “religious leaders.” In Nigeria that means she sat with the apparatus running the cover-up and took notes.
In her own words, she acknowledged that “at the village and hamlet levels in particular concentrations of the country, scores of innocent people experience killings, mass violence and the total decimation of their livelihoods, time and again, witnessing little or no justice.” She acknowledged the scale of killings “could qualify as genocide.” Her own senior legal experts told her directly they “cannot say that genocide is not happening anywhere in Nigeria.”
Then she issued a report saying there is no evidence of religious persecution.
Prior to her trip, the European Centre for Law and Justice, Genocide Watch, and 21Wilberforce each submitted documented evidence of anti-Christian massacres for her consideration. She came home and said there’s nothing to see.
Lying to hide the genocide is nothing new for the UN. I build schools in displacement camps in Abuja. The UNHCR wrote a detailed report about those camps in 2015. When I contacted them in 2020, they officially denied the camps exist. But they do, and the victims are still there.
More than 185,000 Christians and non-jihadist Muslims have been killed since 2009. More than 20,000 churches burned. Twelve million driven from their homes.
And the UN just handed Nigeria a clean bill of health.
The only certain conclusion from the report is that the UN Rapporteur is either corrupt, complicit, or a complete ignoramus. And her Oxford position likely rules out ignoramus.
The United Nations is not a neutral observer in Nigeria’s genocide. It is a participant in covering it up.
#EarthShaker
***This article by Mike Arnold was first published in his Facebook page.
A.I
June 24, 2026
Tags: Mike Arnold