Professor Chidi Odinkalu is a Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist and senior legal officer with the Africa Programme of the Open Society Justice Initiative based in Abuja, Nigeria. He was Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, NHRC. He attended Nigerian Law School and was called to the bar in 1988. He was admitted to the Bar on November 3, 1988. He obtained his Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria and also the Chairman of the Governing Council of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, NHRC. Prior to joining the staff of Open Society Justice Initiative, Odinkalu was a lecturer of law at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts; senior legal officer responsible for Africa and the Middle East at the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights in London; Human Rights Advisor to the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone, and Brandeis International Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Justice and Public Life of the Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. He has received wide publicity on diverse subjects of international law, international economic and human rights law, public policy, and political economy affecting African countries. He is always consulted to advise multilateral and bilateral institutions on Africa-related policy.Institutions that consults him include the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, and the World Economic Forum. Odinkalu is credited with leading the Campaign against Impunity (CAI), to press for accountability by former Liberian President, Charles Taylor between the years 2004 to 2006. The campaign yielded a result with the transfer of Charles Taylor to the custody of the UN-supported Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone in April 2006. He is also a leader of the FoI Coalition whose efforts were credited with the enactment of Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Act in May 2011. He maintains extensive networks across Africa which he built over several years of working for human rights and social justice on the African Continent. He is associated with several non-governmental and academic institutions both within and outside Africa. Odinkalu is a member of the Human Rights Advisory Council of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and the boards of the Fund for Global Human Rights and the International Refugee Rights Initiative. A member of the Executive Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) since 2005, he was also the Co-ordinator of NBA’s Practice Section on Public Interest and Development Law (SPIDEL) between the year 2006 and 2010. He is a Trustee of the Human Rights Institute of the NBA (NBA—HRI). In this Interview with The New Diplomat’s Abuja Bureau Chief, Augustine Osayande, he speaks on the recent raid on the houses of some judges, rising cases of abduction and forceful marriage of teenage girls, challenges of safety and security, worsening human right abuses and how it affects foreign investment.
What is your view on the recent raid by DSS on the homes of some judges in the country?
I don’t know whether to call them DSS or SSS. I prefer not to call them DSS, I call them SSS because that is their statutory name. You don’t change the law by a subsidiary instrument. I think it is important to start with acknowledging that we do have a problem in the judicial system that needs to be addressed and it affects everybody, it affects the credibility of delivery of justice. I think the way the SSS is going about it is terribly inept. It is criminally lawless and it does not in any way help the process of trying to bring to account people who have been accused of judicial corruption. It is entirely unacceptable, there is no way any respectful person will look at what the SSS has done and suggest it is acceptable. The government does not exist to encourage ‘mob justice’ and the idea that “we have judicial corruption,(therefore) lynch all judges” just doesn’t make sense. When government begins to seek help as an agent and you know that there no justice, that is a crime.
What then is the best method of curbing judicial corruption in the country?
There is no best method, you ensure there is accountability. No society should tolerate judicial corruption. It is a terrible thing, it pollutes every stream reason of justice system and so I accept that. But we got to understand that it is something serious and we got to allocate resources and attention span in dealing with it. Dealing with it means ensuring there is accountability, not just retiring people who are accused of judicial corruption but bringing them to justice and submitting them to checks, that means. Now the best SSS has done (even if they have justification for what they did) was to destroy the evidence to make it impossible to bring anybody to account seriously for judicial corruption and what we have now is propaganda and propaganda is not helpful. If you want to do this, you have to establish a team that is going to act across departments, across agencies, a multi-agency tasks force or task group with high-level skills for investigating this kind of white collar crime and with a broad spectrum of possibility of ways in which they can intervene. The kind of conduct I have seen and the way they conducted this does not suggest to me they got the nerves within the SSS to do what is required.
Some believe that without this kind of approach, they will not be able to gather the needed evidence to prosecute the judges.
What is this kind of approach, violent and lawless ineptitude? That is not an approach. That is just violent, lawless ineptitude. That is cheap populism. It is unprofessional and it cannot be encouraged. What Nigerians are calling approach is the law of fire, gasoline, the matches, the lynch mob. That is not justice, it is not an approach, it is lynching. If people want to say lynch all judges by all means then let it be clear and before that we have to also lynch all the politicians. Look at it, they said they collected about N93 million and some other currency from the house of God-knows-how-many but I know they did not count any money and I know that is not verifiable. But let’s assume that is what they did and if I go to the houses of one politician in this Abuja, I will get multiples of that, right, so we would start lynching them (politicians) and there would be lots of bodies to lynch. That is not appropriate, but let agree that is what we want to do and we do it.
Do you think a prompt response from NJC by investigating and making some recommendations on how to discipline these judges would have prevented this?
Who says the NJC did not investigate the judges? I think what people want is that once the SSS says the judges are corrupt, we bring them, quarter them, cut them, hang them and desiccate their body. No, it doesn’t happen that way. The investigation takes time, you got to amass your evidences and sometimes it takes much longer than you wish, but you can’t just say because a complaint has been lodged and we find it in favour of the complainant. You can’t do that; you have to follow due process. The other side, of course, is that I do think the NJC needs to be reformed. I think the NJC is overly controlling things that happen in the judiciary and I think we can do better than that. We have to ensure that punishment for verified cases of judicial corruption should not just be retirement or suspension or interdictions or dismissal from the bench. I think when the NJC finds such a thing has happened, it has a duty to send the person involved for trial and that, it has consistently failed to do. Since 2000, 73 judges have been sanctioned by the NJC and it is only one, that is, Justice Auta, most recently, that has been sent to trial. That is not agreeable in my view. I think there is a need for improvement in that area, but we need to recognise the fact that investigations take time. What is your view on rising cases of abduction and forceful marriage of teenage girls in the country? I don’t want to make an assumption of facts of each case. So, I would not speak broadly on it. I think marriage is a major commitment that anybody makes and it should be made with the full back capability to the concern. There are issues around child marriage, to begin with. Nigeria has one of the highest prevalence rates of child marriage in the world and I believe there is need to address that because child marriage is just a norm that denies the child of future possibilities. Marriage without consent is not marriage. So, when you talk of abduction into marriage and all of that, as a matter of principle, if the person who is alleged to be married lacks the capacity to consent, that is not marriage. I think it is a point we validate that fact and where that is alleged to have happened, then it means the person who is responsible for that manner of marriage should be held accountable. I mean “marriage” now because fundamentally, if there is no consent or if there is abduction (which implies an absence of consent) there is no marriage.
What is your take on the incessant killings by herdsmen in some parts of the country?
The issue of killings in Nigeria is that of safety and security. That is the biggest responsibility of the federal government, to guaranty safety and security of all its citizens. I think the challenge of safety and security goes beyond the question of killings by cattle herders. Across the country, we got serious issues, so I don’t want to create false equivalent between patternlogy of violence because violence is across the board. We have electoral violence: the politicians procure guns, slaughter people in order to get power. We got law-enforcement violence, the kind of thing you had in Zaria that led to the killing of hundreds and extra-judicial execution by different arms of law enforcement. We got kidnapping in South-East, South-South. We also have attacking of pipelines in the South-South, there is vigilantism in the South-West, there is indigeneship-centered violence in the Middle-Belt, there’s sectarian violence taking place now in the North, the Boko Haram violence in the North-East, every geopolitical zone in the country has its own patternlogy form of violence. I think the government deserves some credit for having degraded the level of Boko Haram violence in the North-East but beyond that, I don’t think the government has done nothing more to address the generalized forms of violence we see in different parts of the country and some of that requires more than extra-ordinary deployment of security outlet. Part of it is also making the police more capable than it is now and making it more competent than it is on how to do the work of policing and on that, I think the government can be a lot more imaginative than as is at the moment.
Still, on the human right violation, we have seen situations where the court granted bail to some citizens but it was not obeyed by the government. Do you think this has worsened the rating of the country in terms of human right abuses?
It is not just that, we started with the story of the judges, now one of the judges what is the crime he committed granting bail to Nnamdi Kanu and Sambo Dasuki and then you go and start cracking their head. That is not just right. I am sorry, it is absolutely not right. Now if that is where we are, then there is a huge problem. We are descending into despotism and that surely cannot be the basis to do the kind of violence which the SSS clearly has done.
Generally speaking, what is your view on cases of human rights abuses in the country?
We are in serious position. Remember the criticism of the current President. And the reason why people never trusted him was that they suspected he was an unreconstructed autocrat. Now, with these things happening, from the Zaria massacre to the raid on houses of judges, disobedience of court orders and unrestrained comments on pending cases, people will continue to wonder whether his claims to have reconstructed himself is true. I do think a government must be careful about the kind of image its choses to pass within and beyond the country. When government begins to encourage institutions with enormous powers to do the kind of thing this administration has encouraged the SSS to do … at that point, citizens have got to make up their mind whether this is the kind of country they authorized him with their votes to come and rule. I have my fears about the direction the country is been kept. No foreigner is going to invest in a country in which people are smashing the head of judges because if it can happen to judges, it can happen to anybody. You remember the case of MTN? How the administration slammed great fine on it without any rule at the beginning of this year. Now, you have a situation that members of the National Assembly use parliamentary privileges to impugn MTN compliance regime. That is diminishing the investor’s values and nobody wants investors values to diminish. So when people talk about foreign investment, I just laugh at them because we are not serious about that.
What is the way forward?
Rules, Rules, and Rules. We got to respect basic rules and respect human beings and that can be done without sacrificing commitment to accountability in the public space and more accountable public institutions whether in the executive, legislature, and judiciary. Nobody should argue that the judiciary is above the rules but nobody should also argue that the judiciary is beneath the rules. If you say a judge has committed a crime, do the right thing, hold him or her accountable, put him/her away and I will support that. But not the kind of uncivilized criminality and abuse of power that we see today.
Do you think the National Assembly can play a key role in this?
The National Assembly has oversight power of all entities. The NJC is not a judicial body; it is an administrative body established by the constitution and to that extent, it is subject to the oversight of the National Assembly so they can do it.
