ARE CONDEMNED PERSONS ENTITLED TO ENFORCE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS?

If a person condemned to death by a court of competent jurisdiction complains under Chapter IV of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (the Constitution) that any of the provisions of this Chapter has been breached in regard to him, is he entitled to enforce these rights? And if he is so entitled, to which of the provisions, before which court can he seek redress? These issues and other related ones will be examined in this paper with a view to determine whether or not a condemned person automatically forfeits his fundamental rights as soon as he is convicted and sentenced to death. This paper also evaluates the manner of execution of condemned prisoners by hanging in Nigeria vis-a-vis the evolving and dynamic International clamour from other jurisdictions that the death penalty has come to be regarded in contemporary human rights jurisprudence as a violation of the right not to be subjected to torture, inhuman and degrading punishment with particular searchlight on the inevitable long wait between the imposition of the death sentence and the actual infliction of death, usually referred to as the “death-row phenomenon” as a crucial factor in the characterization of the death penalty as a destructive, cruel and degrading “treatment in the evolving standards of civilization.