A Court of Appeal in Finland has reduced the prison sentence of Simon Ekpa, the self-proclaimed Biafra agitator, from six years to four years.
The court, in a ruling on Thursday, upheld Mr Ekpa’s conviction by a district court for participating in the activities of a terrorist group and publicly inciting crimes with terrorist intent.
The 41-year-old has been in custody since November 2024, when he was arrested by Finnish authorities.
He had appealed the September 2025 judgment of the Päijät-Häme District Court, which sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment.
Prosecutors also appealed the lower court’s judgment, seeking a stiffer sentence.
But the appellate court reduced the sentence, holding that 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 judgment, the court said the district court accepted the prosecution’s case that Mr Ekpa acted from Finland as the supreme commander of several armed groups operating in South-east Nigeria.
The prosecution had told the court that the groups sought to establish an independent Biafran state, with members carrying out attacks on police stations, government buildings and military roadblocks to achieve that objective.
The appellate court said it evaluated the same evidence presented by prosecutors and reached the same conclusions as the district court regarding Mr Ekpa’s activities.
During the appeal, however, Mr Ekpa presented new evidence to argue that an internal armed conflict was ongoing in South-east Nigeria.
He argued that international humanitarian law should apply instead of Finland’s national terrorism laws because his activities were connected to the conflict and lacked terrorist intent.
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The court examined the nature of the conflict, the organisation of the armed groups and the intensity of the fighting, comparing the evidence with legal assessments of the Balkan wars by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
It found that evidence of Nigerian government forces using heavy weapons, including armoured vehicles and combat helicopters, supported the argument that an internal armed conflict existed in the region.
However, the court ruled that the fighting did not meet the legal threshold for a civil war.
Despite rejecting Mr 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.
