The report did not seek to provide a comprehensive account of all violence affecting Christian communities in Nigeria or to analyse the figures in depth. Nevertheless, the ECU agreed that it did not provide sufficient contextual information to meet the appropriate standard of accuracy.  While monitoring groups were cited claiming that there was “no evidence” Christians were being killed more than Muslims or targeted disproportionately, the article did not clearly acknowledge that there have been sustained and serious attacks on Christian communities, including church burnings and killings of worshippers, which are documented by a range of credible sources. The cumulative effect was that readers unfamiliar with the situation could have inferred that claims of significant anti-Christian violence were exaggerated.  The ECU also accepted the reader’s reservations about the article’s use of data from the political violence monitor ACLED.  It did not make clear that ACLED does not routinely disaggregate victims of political violence according to religious affiliation, and that its data on religious targeting capture only cases in which religious identity is made explicit in the reports which it monitors.  Readers would therefore have been unaware of its limitations as a measure of the incidence of violence against Christians.

Upheld