A finnish Court of Appeal has upheld Simon Ekpa’s terrorism conviction from six years to four years.
In a ruling on Thursday, the court upheld Simon Ekpa’s convictions by a district court for participating in the activities of biafra which publicly incited people to commit crimes with terrorist intention.
Before this judgement, both Simon Ekpa and the prosecution had challenged the original district court ruling, setting up an appeal hearing
Simon Ekpa, 41, according to Newsflash findings, has been in custody since November 2024 when he was arrested by law enforcement in Finland.
He thereafter, appealed the September 2025 judgment of the Päijät-Häme district court, which sentenced him to six years in prison.
The prosecutors also appealed, seeking a harsher sentence against him.
The appeal court, reduced his sentence because the circumstances surrounding the offences closely resembled those in which grounds for exemption from criminal liability, such as civil war, self-defence and necessity, could apply.
In its ruling, however, the appellate court noted that the district court had upheld the prosecution’s case that Simon Ekpa coordinated activities from Finland as the overall leader of multiple armed groups operating in south-east Nigeria.
The prosecution alleged that the groups were pursuing the creation of an independent Biafran state and that their members attacked police stations, government buildings and military checkpoints to further that aim.
The appellate court said it evaluated the same evidence tendered by the prosecutors and arrived at the same findings as the district court on Simon Ekpa’s role.
Simon Ekpa introduces new evidence
At the appeal hearing, however, Simon Ekpa introduced new evidence to back his claim that south-eastern Nigeria was experiencing an internal armed conflict.
He argued that his conduct should be assessed under international humanitarian law and not under Finland’s anti-terrorism laws, stating that his actions were tied to the conflict and had no terrorist intent.
To determine the claim, the court reviewed the character of the conflict, how the armed groups were organised and how intense the hostilities were, drawing comparisons with legal findings from the Balkan wars by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
It held that evidence of the Nigerian government’s use of heavy weapons, including armoured vehicles and combat helicopters, supported the position that an internal armed conflict existed.
However, the court ruled that the fighting did not meet the legal threshold for a civil war.
Despite rejecting Simon Ekpa’s argument that the conflict removed terrorist intent from his actions, the court considered the circumstances relevant to sentencing and reduced his prison term to four years.
Meanwhile, Nnamdi Kanu 2025 sentence according to Dr. Austin Orette who is based in the United States of America, is a win win for Nigeria’s “Rule of A Law”.
He called on people especially those from South east to stop seeing it as a political witch-hunt but rather face it for the crime that it is.
A fresh wave of national debate has sparked following a thought-provoking opinion piece by Dr. Austin Orette, a Nigerian scholar based in Houston. He described the recent sentencing of Nnamdi Kanu as “a major victory for the rule of law and Nigeria’s democratic integrity.”
Dr. Orette, however, believes that the court’s decision demonstrates Nigeria’s justice system can effectively manage high-profile, politically sensitive, and emotionally charged cases without falling apart. He contends that, contrary to popular fears, “the sky did not fall” after the judgment—instead, the legal process finally brought some much-needed clarity and closure.
In his article, Dr. Orette emphasized that Kanu’s prolonged detention, as the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), fostered a troubling perception of legitimacy around the separatist movement. Continue reading here.
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