The Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre has unveiled a comprehensive and landmark guide to human rights and public interest litigation in Nigeria, delivering to citizens, legal practitioners, civil society organisations, and human rights defenders across the country a practical, accessible, and detailed roadmap for enforcing constitutional rights and challenging the systematic abuses that continue to deny millions of Nigerians access to justice in both formal and informal settings.
PLAC Executive Director Clement Nwankwo described the guide as the product of careful and deliberate work designed to equip a broad range of users with the legal knowledge and practical tools needed to deploy the law effectively in protecting rights, challenging abuses committed by state and non-state actors alike, and contributing to the construction of a more just, transparent, and accountable Nigerian society.
He said the publication examined in accessible language the full spectrum of rights guaranteed under the Nigerian Constitution, the rights protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Nigeria was a signatory, economic and social rights recognised under international instruments, and civil rights protected under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The document also covered the practical procedural steps for instituting rights enforcement actions, including the specific rules governing Fundamental Rights Enforcement proceedings in Nigerian courts.
Nwankwo was forthright and specific in identifying the patterns of rights violation that the guide was designed to help citizens challenge, naming abuses of the right to fair hearing, the right to bail, the right to liberty, the right to life, freedom of movement, freedom of worship, property ownership, and freedom from discrimination as among the most prevalent and damaging violations occurring across the country.
He was particularly forceful in condemning the widespread and thoroughly unacceptable practice by security agencies of parading suspects on national television without subsequent prosecution, describing it as an act of institutional laziness that violated the presumption of innocence and caused irreparable reputational harm to individuals who were never convicted of any offence.
“A lot of people are arrested and paraded on television and that is the end of the case. Ask yourself, how many people paraded on television do you later see being tried? I do not know any, really,” he said, adding that the practice served primarily to satisfy the public relations needs of security agencies rather than to advance the cause of justice.
He also identified the right to privacy under Section 37 of the Constitution as one of the most comprehensively and routinely violated rights in contemporary Nigeria, citing with particular concern the increasingly common practice of police and other security officers stopping citizens in public spaces and on public transport and demanding unauthorised access to their personal mobile phones and other devices on the pretext of searching for evidence of cybercrime or financial fraud, conduct he described as constitutionally impermissible in any genuinely civilised society.
Supreme Court Justice Emmanuel Agim, who formally unveiled the document at the ceremony, made the important observation that fundamental rights as commonly understood did not encompass the full range of constitutionally protected rights, arguing that meaningful protection of the narrower category of fundamental rights was ultimately dependent on a broader culture of respect for the constitutional framework as a whole. He cited the right to vote as a particularly instructive example, arguing that without vigorous protection of this foundational constitutional right, many other fundamental rights would be rendered practically meaningless regardless of the strength of legal provisions on paper.
House of Representatives Committee on Human Rights Chairman Abiola Peter Makinde described the guide’s launch as a genuine milestone in the national effort to strengthen access to justice for all Nigerians regardless of their education level or financial resources, while the Country Representative of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which supported the guide’s development, described it as a critically important contribution to ensuring that ordinary citizens had effective tools to seek redress when their rights were violated.
