Released
Mubarak Bala is the President of the Nigerian Humanist Association. In April 2020 he was arrested, accused of being ‘provocative and annoying to Muslims’ on Facebook. He is currently being arbitrarily detained in Kano State, a region that allows for the operation of Sharia courts alongside secular courts, where riots and murder are not uncommon for accusations of blasphemy, and where blasphemy carries the death penalty. In October 2020, Bala was finally granted access to his legal team, more than five months after his initial arrest. In December, a judge at the High Court in Abuja, Nigeria, ruled that he should be immediately released on bail after finding that his continuous incarceration without charge violated his fundamental rights guaranteed under the Nigerian Constitution. However, Kano State officials are ignoring the ruling.