End SARS is a decentralised social movement, and series of mass protests against police brutality in Nigeria. The slogan calls for the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a notorious unit of the Nigerian Police with a long record of abuses. The protests which takes its name from the slogan started in 2017 as a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #ENDSARS. The movement has since expanded to include demands for good and acountable governance.
About End SARS in brief
End SARS is a decentralised social movement, and series of mass protests against police brutality in Nigeria. The slogan calls for the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a notorious unit of the Nigerian Police with a long record of abuses. The protests which takes its name from the slogan started in 2017 as a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #ENDSARS. After experiencing a revitalisation in October 2020 following more revelations of the abuses of the unit, mass demonstrations occurred throughout the major cities of Nigeria, accompanied by vociferous outrage on social media platforms. The movement has since expanded to include demands for good and acountable governance. There have been international demonstrations in solidarity with those happening in the country, and the movement has also grown increasingly critical of Muhammadu Buhari’s government response to the protests. SARS had been accused of several human rights violations, illegal stop and searches, illegal arrests and detentions, extrajudicial killings, sexual harassment of women and brutalising of young male Nigerians. In 2017, Nigerian activists, youth and celebrities across the nation took to the streets in a peaceful protest to spread awareness of SARS brutality and extortions and to demand its disbanding. In 2018, Nigerian rapper Michael Uchukwu Stephens joined the campaign to end police brutality. The campaigners moved from social media using the #EndSARS hashtag to organised peaceful protests in Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan, Osogbo, Ijesha, and Ilorin. A 2016 report by Amnesty International, indicted SARS maintaining that the squad was responsible for human rights abuses, cruelty, degrading treatment of Nigerians in their custody, and other widespread torture.
Amnesty International documented 82 cases of abuses and extra judicial killings by SARS between January 2017 and May 2020. The move was widely received as a triumph of the demonstrations. However, it was noted in many quarters that similar announcements had been made in recent years to pacify the public without the unit actually being disbanded, and that the government had merely planned to reassign and review SARS officers to medical centres rather than disband the unit entirely. A few Senators backed the call for a total disbandment of the SARS unit. Consideration was given to reforming the force rather than full disbandment due to the number of cases of falling cases rather than reforming the full force. The protesters have continued accordingly and the Nigerian government has maintained a pattern of violent repression including the killing of demonstrators. It was achieved at the time to announce the reform of the police authority but nothing has been achieved at this time to end the police brutality and human rights abuse. The campaign has since moved from the social media hashtag to the peaceful protests using the hashtags #ENDSARS and #EndEARS. It has also moved to social media to organised protests in Lagos and Abubadan using #EndEndESARS. A large section of the victims of the abuse of Sars have been young male Nigerianians.
You want to know more about End SARS?
This page is based on the article End SARS published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
