By Theophilus Abbah
In the past decade, judges in Nigeria have been captured by political power, a situation that has been linked to violent criminality and conflict in the country. However, against great odds, some brave legal minds are fighting to restore the rule of law.
When law professor Chidi Anselm Odinkalu started receiving serious death threats, he understood that he had been stepping on powerful toes. Odinkalu (now 57), who, as a former head of the Nigerian Human Rights Commission, had relied on the integrity of the judiciary in his country to address human rights violations, had noted a dangerous slide away from such integrity after 2016. On the night of 8 October that year, the Department of State Service (DSS), Nigeria’s powerful secret police, raided the residences of 15 judges in six Nigerian states on suspicions of ‘corruption’.
Politics and grudges
The case turned out to be a scam, or in the words of the National Judicial Council (NJC), “a denigration of the entire judiciary as an institution.” The NJC said that the DSS’s claim that the Council itself had sent in a complaint about the fifteen judges was untrue: it had only reported two of the fifteen, and these two had been disciplined. The case was later also dismissed for lack of evidence by the court.
Several affected judges then publicly stated their suspicions that the raid had been either motivated politically or by grudges held by the DSS. One said it was possible he had been included in the raid because he had berated the DSS in open court over a matter of unlawful detention. Another had ruled in favour of an opposition party. A third had, based on human rights concerns, granted bail to a separatist leader as well as to a former National Security Adviser who had been kept in DSS custody for more than a year without being charged with anything. A fourth had, about a decade previously, ordered the arrest and detention for professional misconduct of a lawyer who, at the time of the raid, had become the Minister of Justice.
The raid was called “a denigration of the entire judiciary”
Whatever might have prompted the DSS raid in 2016, it had a chilling effect. Professor Odinkalu, who had left the NHRC in the same year, recalls it as an “act carried out to intimidate the judiciary,” adding, “you could see a manifest recalibration of the judicial psyche thereafter.” He noted a pattern starting to emerge in two ways: first, increased intermingling between judges and powerful politicians, including reciprocal gifts and favours (see box), and second, an increase in rulings that favoured the powers-that-be and covered up human rights violations.
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