A UN committee found Nigeria responsible for “grave and systematic violations” of the rights of women and girls a decade after the Boko Haram abduction of schoolgirls in Chibok. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) released a report on Wednesday detailing extensive trauma suffered by the schoolgirls and a failure by the Nigerian government to offer adequate support.

The report was created following a series of visits to Nigeria in 2023, where the committee’s delegation visited several states and met with government officials and Boko Haram abduction survivors.

Within the report, it was highlighted that the survivors of the attack were often subject to forced marriage, religious conversion, and physical and sexual violence. After the fact, many of the freed girls received no form of training or rehabilitation, or help for families who sold everything to attempt to free their daughters. At this point, 103 of the girls have been freed, while the status of 91 girls remains unknown. The government is no longer in negotiations for their release.

The Chibok schoolgirl abduction occurred in April 2014, in which 276 girls were taken from their school by Boko Haram militants in Borno state as part of a broader trend of forced abduction and disappearances of children in Nigeria. The animus of the attacks is the ideological opposition to Western education and the education of women. Boko Haram’s name itself means “Western education is forbidden.”

As a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Nigeria is legally bound to uphold the rights outlined in the treaty, including taking appropriate measures to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women under Article 2(f). The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights also obliges Nigeria to protect the life, liberty, and security of a person under Article 9.