ABUJA (Reuters) – Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Tuesday called on Nigeria’s government to investigate the findings of a Reuters report on a secret abortion programme in northeast Nigeria published this month.
The investigation published on Dec. 7 said the Nigerian army had run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the country’s northeast since at least 2013.
“I think it’s really important to underline that they investigate all these cases (of forced abortion),” Baerbock said in response to a question from a journalist about the Reuters report during a visit to the West African country.
“The U.N. Secretary General has said these should be investigated,” she told a news conference.
Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama told the news conference with Baerbock that the allegations were “being looked into”, even though they bore “no truth whatsoever”.
“We are giving it attention that we feel deserved because the human rights of Nigerians is something that this government takes seriously,” he said, adding that there was no reason to involve the military.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Nigerian authorities to investigate the “allegations of systemic and coerced abortions” days after the report’s release.
The secret abortion programme involved terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters.
(Reporting by Camillus Eboh; Writing by Sofia Christensen; Editing by James Macharia Chege and Jon Boyle)
