Hearing on the return of the Du Merci children adjourned until January 2025

A court hearing in the Kano State capital on the case to secure the return of 16 children from the Du Merci Centres for vulnerable children was adjourned on 4 November 2024.

The case was rescheduled for 14 January 2025.

According to CSW’s sources, lawyers for the Kano State Ministry of Women Affairs, which currently has custody of the children, ‘did not show up in the court.’

The 16 children were among 27 who were seized from the Du Merci Centres in Kano and Kaduna States following the arrest of the Centres’ co-founder and their adopted father, Professor Solomon Musa Tarfa, on Christmas Day in 2019. The Kano State Ministry of Women Affairs subsequently placed them in the government-run Nasarawa Children’s Home in Kano City, where they have experienced mistreatment, ostracism and pressure to convert.

In January 2021 the five youngest children, then aged between three and eight, were forcibly relocated to a remote facility, allegedly owned by the former governor of Kano State, where their names were changed and they were obliged to recite Arabic, study the Qur’an and attend a mosque. They were returned to the Kano City orphanage as the current trial got underway, but by then they had reportedly forgotten their siblings.

In June 2021 Professor Tarfa was acquitted of ‘abducting children from their legal guardians and confining them in an unregistered orphanage,’ and on 27 January 2023 he was acquitted of forgery and discharged by an appeal court. However, the children were not returned to the custody of the professor and his wife, Mercy Tarfa.

During hearings on 28 November 2023 and 15 February 2024, the presiding judge in High Court 12, Bompai Complex, Kano City, instructed the Ministry of Women Affairs and the Tarfas to come to an out of court settlement about the children’s future.

However, the Tarfas and their legal representatives were unable to arrange a meeting to conclude a settlement, despite writing letters to the Commissioner for Women Affairs and the Director of Research and Planning of the Ministry of Women Affairs, and making several attempts to meet with the Commissioner for Justice and Chief Justice of Kano State.

CSW has also learned that one of the children, an 11-year-old girl named Esther, was recently taken from Nasarawa Orphanage without the knowledge of her siblings or the consent of the Tarfas and their legal representatives. Her whereabouts are currently unknown, although there is speculation she may have been sent to an Islamic boarding school in possible preparation for an early marriage. Esther’s birth mother, who was orphaned at a young age and gave birth to her as a teenager, has joined the Tarfas in the continuing search for their daughter.

In June 2021, the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Professor Tarfa and the 16 children had been detained arbitrarily. The Working Group called for the children’s immediate release, adding that the Tarfas and the 16 children were entitled to ‘compensation and other reparations, in accordance with international law.’

CSW’s Founder President Mervyn Thomas said: ‘It is regrettable that the Du Merci children were not returned to the Tarfas’ care immediately once the professor was acquitted of child abduction. The prolonged legal proceedings are compounding the trauma of these children, who have now been separated from the only parents most of them have ever known for five years. We urge the Kano State authorities to rectify the grave injustices this family has endured by ensuring the return of all of the children, and that reparations are made in accordance with the UN Working Group’s ruling.’