Washington Breaks its Own Laws
As Nigeria Commits Atrocities
While Benefiting from US Aid
Taiwo Hassan / Responsible Statecraft

(October 1, 2025) — The very week the United States’ Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a $346 million arms sale to Nigeria, the U.S. State Department also released its 2024 Country report on human rights practices in the West African country.

The report, which has previously affected the country’s eligibility for security assistance, confirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: that the security forces of Nigeria, Washington’s most significant ally in Sub-Saharan Africa, habitually operate with impunity and without due regard for human rights protection — a key condition for receiving U.S. security cooperation.

For example, the report spotlighted the following human rights abuses as ongoing concerns: “arbitrary and unlawful killings; disappearances; or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious abuses in a conflict.”

It also claimed that “military operations against ISIS-WA, Boko Haram, and criminal organization targets” often resulted in civilian deaths. Other findings include the use of “excessive force,” “sexual violence and other forms of abuse” by the military in the pursuit of jihadists, as well as inappropriate detention for prolonged periods and often in poor conditions of women and children removed from or allegedly associated with jihadists reportedly for “security screening and perceived intelligence value.”

Interestingly, the new arms sale is meant for exactly the same theater of operations where the above alleged abuses have reportedly occurred. There, in the treacherous terrain of the country’s northeast, Nigeria’s army has been fighting for more than a decade in a bloody stand-off with jihadists. The arms are also meant for use in and around the Gulf of Guinea where piracy and illegal trafficking of arms, humans and narcotics pose new challenges.

What this means therefore is that if approved, U.S.-origin weapons comprising an assortment of munitions, precision bombs, rockets and related equipment would arm units of Nigeria’s security forces whose egregious abuses bordering on war crimes are confirmed not just by civil societies but by the U.S. State Department.

Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been the world’s leading arms-exporting nation accounting between 2019 and 2023 for 42 percent of all global arms exports. Several laws exist ostensibly to regulate and ensure that U.S. security assistance is provided to allies without undermining America’s core values. For example, Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act expressly forbids the United States from providing security assistance to any country whose government engages in a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Investigations by human rights groups and the media, including Reuters and Premium Times, have uncovered a consistent pattern of abuse by security forces that suggests that Nigeria has met this threshold.

However, not once have any of the relevant legal provisions conditioning arms sales on respect for human rights and civilian harm concerns been enforced. Indeed, successive U.S. administrations since the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans alike, have routinely ignored them while there is as yet no record of Congress successfully stopping an arms sale on this account — although it has delayed some. In 2022, during the Biden administration, Congress blocked a planned shipment of 12 AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria over human rights concern, but this was soon reversed.

This divergence between what the U.S. law says and what the government actually does reflects a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Washington’s foreign policy between its human rights advocacy and the pursuit of global military primacy, in pasrt through arms sales. It is a contradiction the world has seen play out in the bloody conflict in the Middle East where, despite carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Israel remains a top recipient of U.S. security assistance.

As the Center for Civilian in Conflict (CIVIC) noted in a recent report, Washington often “elevates other competing priorities, including addressing threats from non-state actors and strategic competition by other key powers, over concerns for civilian protection and human rights even where significant fears exist about potential misuse of U.S. security assistance.”

A Note from the Quincy Institute
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don’t miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.