I should begin by thanking the Young Lawyers Forum of the Nigerian Bar Association, Onitsha Branch, for inviting me to join in this colloquium. Onitsha is, of course, the premier Bar in this part of Nigeria. This city produced the first lawyer from the East in Sir Louis Mbanefo in 1935.
It has since then established and sustained a most prolific production line in lawyers, becoming host to perhaps the biggest Bar east of the Niger. This city also boasts a proud tradition of refined advocacy, a fact that is testified to by its interminable collection of some of the finest advocates and judicial figures in the history of Nigeria’s legal profession.
This tradition can be both an inspiration and a burden and it is not always be easy to separate the gift of inspiration that this tradition represents from the weight of the burden that it can place on its inheritors.
This is a difficult season in which to survive or even gather in the name of law and justice in Nigeria. All over the country, including, of course, within the legal profession, hardship abounds. In a country overcome by evident signs of a reign of the twin ogres of impunity and vigilantism, it is predictably difficult to speak about rule of law or – even less so – invoke the idea of justice.
The banishment of justice from the consciousness of law and legality in Nigeria is the result of an interaction of factors both exogenous and endogenous to the legal profession and its institutions. A political economy of impunity has been enabled, even weaponized by a preoccupation with a jurisprudence of performative technicality.
The result is a country in which the rich who have amassed appearances of power and material comfort at the expense of the poor. General Sam Momah, pioneer Commandant of Nigeria’s Defence College describes the country as one in which “the poor cannot sleep because of hunger, and the rich cannot sleep because the poor is awake.”
Chris Gwabin Musa, the Army General who is also Nigeria’s current Chief of Defence Staff, has more recently warned that “hunger and poverty are no longer mere social challenges – they have become national security threats.”
Our current national condition of compounded institutional incapacity and popular pauperization in the face of generational hardship must be what the organisers had in mind in their reference to “turbulent times.” In the face of such hardships, many may argue that the only battle worth fighting is one that guarantees bread on the table.
That may well be the case but if the price of affording bread today is to foreclose future possibilities of access to wheat or access to the farm for those who must produce the wheat without which there can be no bread tomorrow, then we have a duty to re-evaluate whether the means of procuring the supply of today’s bread is indeed worthwhile.
Inherent in the framing of this colloquium, therefore, is an implicit message of hope and of leadership in shaping it. It seems to me that in seeking to remind us of the challenges of advocacy even in troubled times, the leadership and membership of the YLF in Onitsha seek to telegraph a message of optimism notwithstanding a context that is distinctly dystopian. The vocation of leadership, it has to be said, comprises essentially in sowing and sustaining hope, especially in tough times. For its effort to contribute to this, the Branch deserves commendation.
The Burdens of Citizenship
Having said all this, I would apply most respectfully as I begin to make an important clarification as to my standing and claim to this podium. I consider it a privilege, no doubt, to participate in this ritual of learning among peers, colleagues, friends and elders. I do not take this privilege lightly and, because of that, it is important that I declare my interests.
I do not come here as a person with qualifications in legal studies or, even less so, as someone who has taught law across three continents. For reasons that will become evident shortly, I come here as someone who aspires to claim this land as theirs on the basis of equal citizenship and not as a temporary privilege or benefit.
Ernest Rennan reminds us in his classic on the meaning of nationhood published in 1883, a mere two years before the onset of the Berlin West Africa Conference, that a nation is “the expression of a great solidarity, constituted by a feeling for the common sacrifices that have been made and for those one is prepared to make again….” I recognize that citizenship embodies a promissory note exchanged between sovereign and citizens; and between the dead, the living and the unborn.
But it also signifies entitlements which can only be realized through a dialectical process anchored in both memory and narrative. Unlike the privilege of being a lawyer which can sometimes impose constraints on honesty, the entitlement of citizenship confers a duty of candour on those willing to claim or fight for it.
The subject matter of this colloquium requires that we speak to ourselves candidly for, as a proverb from these parts says, when kinsfolk depart a family meeting in laughter and merriment, it can only be because they have not discharged their duties of candour to one another. This is, therefore, why Ernest Rennan again insists that “Nations are not something eternal. They have begun, they will end….” Those on whose watch this occurs, however, will not be spared harsh judgement from posterity. This is why we must take the duty of civic candour and the companion duty of vigilance that comes with it seriously.
The Rule of Law?
The theme for this colloquium begins with “fearless advocacy” and ends with “the rule of law.” Whenever the Rule of Law is mentioned in the common law world, the reflex is to visit a cemetery in England and there to genuflect before the remains of Albert Venn (AV) Dicey.
The only English name more revered than his in the minds of lawyers in Nigeria is Lord Denning. As young lawyers, you did classes in Legal System, Constitutional Law; and Administrative Law, in which you encountered AV Dicey in the fullest majesty of imperial law. Lecturers in
Nigerian law faculties never get tired of distributing this diet or force-feeding students with it.
As law students, we have been programmed to believe that we must begin any exploration of the “Rule of Law” from the writings of Dicey and his Victorian notions of the rule of law. Dicey’s rule of law embodies benevolent notions of predictability and equality policed under an unwritten constitution by “the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.”
Inherent in Dicey’s concept of the rule of law is the idea of a judiciary whose effectiveness is essentially guaranteed by their notional independence, impartiality and predictability. Dicey’s ideas were, however, originally published in 1893, a mere eight years after the British led imperial European powers to enact the partition of Africa in the Final Act of the Berlin West African Conference. 1893 was also the year in which the British massacred their way through Ijebu Ode on their way to the eventual acquisition of what is today south-west Nigeria.
The world that Dicey described and analysed, therefore, did not treat people like those of us in this room today as humans, and the benevolence that he took for granted as a Caucasian was unknown to the interaction between his people and colonial subjects. This certainly was the case in Africa and for us in Nigeria.
Ernst Fraenkel, the German legal scholar who studied the legal system under Nazi Germany distinguished between the “Normative State” of credible institutions and rule constraint on the one hand and the “Prerogative State” of caprice on the other.
Democratic government, as a rule-constrained system for the transfer and exercise of power in political society, assumes the existence of what Ernst Fraenkel called the normative state of legality, which he distinguished from the authoritarian prerogative state. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has similarly distinguished between a state with rule of law on the one hand, and the “rule of power, which is typically arbitrary, self-interested and subject to influences which may have nothing to do with the applicable law….”, on the other.
The state with the rule of law as described can only exist where there is a reasonably independent judiciary to arbitrate and interpret the norms applicable to the democratic process. It is possible, however, for courts to be instrumentalised under an appearance of rule of law but in a manner that subverts that into establishing what I call the “Law of the Ruler.”
Judicial Independence as a Norm
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Independence of Judges and Lawyers has argued that judicial independence belongs to the domain of a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens), although he stops short of explicating the elements of such a norm.
Under section 36(1) of the 1999 Constitution, “a person shall be entitled to a fair hearing within a reasonable time by a court or other tribunal established by law and constituted in such manner as to secure its independence and impartiality.” At the African continental level, State parties to the African Charter on Democracy,
Elections, and Governance (ACDEG) undertake to “establish and strengthen
national mechanisms that redress election-related disputes promptly.” They also agree to “strive to institutionalise good political governance through an independent judiciary.”12 In the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, they equally subscribe to a “duty to guarantee the independence of the courts.”
In other words, judicial independence is human right under both the constitution of Nigeria and international law. As citizens, lawyers, judges, and law enforcement, we all have a duty – personal as well as institutional – to defend, advocate for, and uphold it.
Practicing Law Or Doing Justice?
Legal practice can be grubby business. It can also be an ennobling vocation, embodying a higher calling to the protection of human dignity and justice. As a guild of professionals, the NBA should promote the latter inclination not the former. Yet as individual practitioners, the landscape of the market shapes many in the direction of the former not the latter.
At the heart of this dissonance between the ideal of the legal profession as an ancient vocation and the reality of its practitioners in our Nigerian market place are twin failures of civic virtue and professional ethics. Surely, if every actor in the justice system is going through the motions for the sake of profiting the pockets, achieving optimal subsistence or impressing a political god-father, then there is no one actually interested in guaranteeing the integrity or value of the institutions that
should protect the public commons without which those pursuits cannot be sustained.
This is arguably where we are with litigants guaranteed to be stuck in court for decades unless they are politicians involved in judicializing partisan disputes. As the courts and justice system have become captured by the politicians and their disputes, any synergies in the system now exist to service this narrow tribe of the well off and political and judicial higher-ups.
Speaking about civic virtue, I should point out that a failure of ethics is not an absence of skill or knowledge but of character, formation, and socialisation. Immanuel Kant called this “mother-wit”, a quality of deliberate and sound character which, if lacking, “no school can make good”, and explained how without this: [a] physician, a judge, or a ruler may have at command many excellent pathological, legal or political rules even to the degree that he may become a profound teacher of them, and yet, none the less, may easily stumble in their application. For, although admirable in understanding, he may be wanting in natural power of judgement.
Essentially, there has to be more to the justice system than merely the private profit motive or transaction of its operators. It was with this in mind that Anthony Kronman chose to describe the outstanding lawyer as: a devoted citizen.
He cares about the public good and is prepared to sacrifice his own well-being for it, unlike those who use the law merely to advance their private ends. …He is distinguished, too, by his special talent for discovering where the public good lies and for fashioning those arrangements needed to secure it.
To understand how this dissonance between legal practice and administration of justice was fashioned, we need to go back a little to how we teach law and our crisis is ultimately founded in legal pedagogy.
Back To The Future: A Crisis Of Legal Pedagogy
The trajectory of legal practice in post-colonial Africa was set long before independence by the lawyers educated in colonial Europe who returned to practice back in territories across the continent. Those of them from the British territories such as Nigeria mostly trained in the United Kingdom. From this, the country derived much of its legal traditions. If this sounds as if there was nothing before that, it is because as a matter of jurisprudence, there was in fact nothing. It is necessary to explain.
The first Nigerian lawyer, Christopher Sapara-Williams, was enrolled in 1888, three years after the end of the Berlin West Africa Conference. That conference, which occurred in the middle of the first Industrial Revolution, in the 44th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, ended in the General Act of the Berlin Conference. This was more than just another treaty in international law. It also has been described as that event “which determined in important ways the future of the continent and which continues to have a profound influence on the politics of contemporary Africa.”
The Berlin Conference was the first international conference on Africa but no African was invited to the meeting. The invention of Africa at the conference was, therefore, accompanied by the European infantilization of Africans. Historian, Godfrey Uzoigwe, recalls that the “polite request of [Seyyid Barghash bin Said Al-
Busaid] the Sultan of Zanzibar to be invited to the conference was ridiculed by Britain and was, therefore, rejected.” This was not entirely surprising. Half a century before the conference, influential German scholar, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, had said of Africans that there was “nothing harmonious with humanity to be found” among them, and of the continent itself that “it is no historical part of the world.” The conference promised among other things “the conservation of the indigenous populations and the amelioration of their moral and material conditions of existence.”
Instead it delivered the opposite, producing a sustained decline in African population in the quarter century that immediately followed it until the end of the 1st World War. This coincided with the period of effective European occupation of Africa.
This was also the period when Europe establish the legal institutions that lawyers these days celebrate. To establish these institutions, the Europeans did two things. First, they made African expendable, liquidating as many as they could. That process produced tragedies much of which remain largely untold, from the concentration camps of the 2nd Boer War, to the colonial massacres and genocides that pork-marked the period of active occupation. It is the continent where
contemporary human rights reporting originated in the report by Roger Casement on King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo.
Second, Europeans built their occupation on the unimaginative falsehood that Africa had no living people before they arrived. It was terra nullius. So, to everything they did they ascribed a constitutive character. This is how Scot, Mungo
Park, “discovered” River Niger. Today, we teach our young law students about “reception statutes” and no law teacher bothers to encourage the students to question this as a matter of moral or intellectual agency nor provide the context that makes this untenable.
Essentially, the “reception” statutes was founded on the idea that Africans did not exist and had no community, institutions or notions of laws before the Europeans arrived. The invention of Africa is today institutionalised in narrative but it started as normative inscription; a matter of law. It began in treaty law at the Berlin
Conference before being established into jurisprudence. At a time when the United Kingdom was the dominant actor in the global political economy, it was no surprise that the canonical articulation of this invention was in common law. Two major events occurred between 1918 and 1919 to fix the legal contours of the invention. First, in June 1914, the Crown referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council the question concerning who had the power between the British
South African Company (BSAC) of Cecil Rhodes and the Crown over Southern Rhodesia lands (Matabeleland and Mashonaland in modern day Zimbabwe over whose territories BSAC had acquired interests through a treaty with the ruler, Lobengula) that had not been alienated by the BSAC. Zimmerer, “Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–8) in German South West Africa and Its Significance” in Dan Stone, (ed), The Historiography of Genocide, (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 323.
When it delivered its report (judgment) four years later in 1918, the Privy Council laid out in legal doctrine the invention of Africa. In reasoning that was morbidly clinical in its inventions, the Privy Council based this doctrine on an othering of Africans that comprehensively rendered them as non-persons, denying their memory, community or agency.
First, Lord Sumner (who delivered the judgment of the Court), asserted with economy that colonial occupation was not preceded by any legitimate leadership. He claimed that “no principle of legitimacy attached to the dynasty of Lobengula….”, arguing that the original owners of colonial lands whom he referred to as “aborigines” were “destitute of any recognizable form of sovereignty.”
Second, having denuded the peoples of Africa (Southern Rhodesia was the focus of the proceedings in this case) of civic capacity or political legitimacy, the Privy Council proceeded to clothe them with perpetual disability and an incapacity of cognition: “By the disinterested liberality of persons in this country their Lordships had the advantage of hearing the case for the natives who were themselves incapable of urging, and perhaps unconscious of possessing, any case at all.”
Third, by now in the full stride of his oratorical majesty, Lord Sumner went after the history and memory of Africa’s peoples and obliterated them in one sentence dripping with scorn: “Whether the Matabele or the Mashonas of today are, in any sense consistent with the transmission or descent of rights of property, identical with the
Matabele or the Mashonas of more than twenty years ago is far from clear, and the fate of the Makalakas and the Maholies, once the slaves of Lobengula, is as obscure as their original rights.”
Fourth, having wiped out their history, the Privy Council spent two short sentences doing the same to the humanity of Africans: “Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society. Such a gulf cannot be bridged.”31
These deprivations proved resilient post-colony. Instead of redressing them, they prospered thereafter, only pausing long enough to alter the pigments of the beneficiaries from white to black.
Fifth, having set up all these building blocks, the Privy Council mercifully put the people out of their existential misery by pronouncing – with a touch of Biblical flourish – the coup de grace in the form of the principle of res nullius: “By the will of the Crown and in exercise of its rights the old state of things, whatever its exact nature, as it was before 1893, has passed away and another and, as their Lordships do not doubt, a better has been established in lieu of it. Whoever now owns the unalienated lands, the natives do not.”33
This decision also coincided with the onset of the negotiations that culminated in the following year in the Paris Conference at the end of the First World War. It was here that the second event was completed in 1919 in the adoption of the League of Nations Covenant. While the jurisprudence of Re Southern Rhodesia “invented” Africa; the League of Nations Covenant consecrated our normative dependency as a fact of international law and relations as follows:
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization….”
The League Covenant continued:
“The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.”
Despite its best efforts, the Charter of the United Nations adopted in 1945 did not exactly end this doctrine of dependency, providing, for instance, that the former League Mandates (many of them in Africa) would be administered as Trust Territories in order “to promote the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of the trust territories.”
In other words, those were the political infants of a merciful world. All of us in this room are the descendants of “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” This was how colony ruled and ruined us, essentially as infants lacking in both discernment and agency. Yet, by the end of the colonial period, we set up an infrastructure of legal training through which those who accomplished that claimed to be “sharing [their] cultural heritage.”
Advocacy And Judicial Independence
When lawyers speak about advocacy, they imply advocacy that occurs in the courts before judges. This imports notions of judicial independence. An independent judiciary has both inherent and functional or instrumental value in organized society. It is important to explain this a little. A state theoretically enjoys three monopolies.
One is a monopoly of fiscal prerogatives or of legitimate taxation, which finances public revenue; the second is the monopoly of legitimate dispute resolution through the courts and tribunals at all levels which is an essential pre-condition for coexistence; and the third is the instrumentality of legitimate violence and coercion. The First monopoly finances the state including the other monopolies.
The second stabilizes the state and its communities, guaranteeing the atmosphere in which citizens can conduct and pursue lawful livelihoods. The third embodies the capability that guarantees that the first two monopolies are viable
The second monopoly in particular is antecedent to the last and its failure guarantees that the last becomes a free-for-all. So, the state has a duty to ensure the delivery of justice because when those who seek justice find themselves habitually denied of it, they default to questioning the presumed monopoly of the state over legitimate violence.
At that point, the state will no longer be able to guarantee basic safety and security and the result is a society in which everyone is for themselves because the authority of government has broken own. This, many would argue, is where we are in Nigeria presently.
This makes it essential to focus a little on the second monopoly concerning the institutions for legitimate dispute resolution. In Nigeria, the integrity of the judicial system which underpins the guarantee of fair trial is no longer a given. As evidence of this, of six Chief Justices of Nigeria since 2011 preceding the current incumbent, only two – Aloma Mukhtar and Mahmud Mohammed – served out their tenures without controversy. Of the last three CJNs preceding the current one, two were effectively fired in circumstances that tarnished the judiciary institutionally and the penultimate scandalized the judiciary with a compulsive disposition towards hawking judicial appointments in a bazaar of undisguised insider-dealing that usually was accompanied by a whiff of political, filial, or genital relations.
Legitimacy is at the heart of the presumptive monopoly of the state over dispute resolution and, therefore, of advocacy. This is why independence is inherent in the judicial function. Notionally, the judiciary embodies the very essence of what Professor SA De Smith described in constitutional design as “politically neutral zones.” If the judges sacrifice their authority on the altar of the illegitimate or the unlawful, courtroom advocacy is imperilled. So, there advocacy that can be described as fearless imports a duty to hold the courts and the judges accountable. For lawyers in commercial practice, those two can seem irreconciliable.
Advocacy: A Duty Of Candour Before More Than One Court
For most lawyers in our traditions, we have been brought up in the belief that advocacy involves going to court only. So, we speak about rule of law before courts of law. But the rule of law is not a prisoner of courts of law. Advocacy is too important a public good to be imprisoned by the courts. Every advocate worth their onions plies their trade before at least four forums:
(a) Courts of law
(b) The court of public opinion
(c) The court of posterity; and (d) The court of the Lord.
Skill and courage lie in discerning where the jurisdiction of one must end and the competence of the other can begin. This is a colloquium and I do not intend to be extensive in my remarks.
In any event, I have recently had my say on the state of independence of the judiciary in Nigeria in a book-length offering – The Selectorate – which is currently on the book-stands. The case I make in the book is a very straightforward one. It is that contrary to popular notions, Nigeria, as a colonized territory, has never had an independent judiciary. Instead of seeking to build one at independence, we swallowed a colonial myth that one existed. In reality, colony was antithetical to and could never bequeath independent institutions.
The question is not whether we have ever had independent institutions. The answer to that is no we have not. Rather, it is how bad the lack of independence has progressively grown. That, hopefully, will become clearer by the end of our conversation today.
Law professor, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), and penultimate VicePresident of Nigeria, Yemi Osinbajo, recently said of the Nigerian judiciary in an address to the Nigerian Bar Association in Yenagoa earlier this month that “Nigeria’s judicial system is crumbling under the weight of corruption, ethical violation and poor standards.” It is my intention to allow others on this panel to speak to the specifics of the manner in which this has ensued. I am delighted for this purpose that we are joined in this conversation by a recently retired judge of the High Court (of Kogi State) who is now also a law professor.
The instinctive, reflexive response to any criticism of the judiciary in Nigeria is defensiveness. The traditional attitude of worshipful deference to judges was founded on an implicit bargain that about judicial comportment. In Nigeria, that bargain broke down a long time ago.
There remain a good many occupants of high judicial office who indeed are doing their best under enormously challenging circumstances to hold the balance of justice together. Increasingly, many of these are beleaguered in a system that has become hostage to the Nigerian condition.
Judicial accountability, therefore, has become an essential part of the discussion about the judiciary. According to the report of Committee IV on “The Judiciary and the Legal Profession under the Rule of Law” of the International Congress of Jurists in New Delhi, India, in 1959: An independent Judiciary is an indispensable requisite of a free society under the Rule of Law.
Such independence implies freedom from interference by the Executive or Legislative with the exercise of the judicial function, but does not mean that the judge is entitled to act in an arbitrary manner. His duty is to interpret the law and the fundamental principles and assumptions that underlie it. (italics supplied)
This tendency towards arbitrariness in both judicial appointments and in judicial comportment is one of the reasons for this conversation. The other reason is the failure of consequences in Nigeria’s legal process for professionals who perpetrate what the law should not allow. Fearlessness must be anchored on a fear of consequences. That begins with building and sustaining capable institutions.
References:
Ph.D. (London-LSE); Professor of Practice, Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. Pro-Chancellor & Chair of Governing Council, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu University, Anambra State, Nigeria; Chair, Board of Directors, International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI), New York/Kampala; Chair, Advisory Board, Global Rights.
Text for Remarks to the Colloquium of the Young Lawyers Forum of the Nigerian Bar Association, Onitsha Branch, 26 June, 2025. The views and opinions expressed here belong exclusively to the author and do not necessarily or at all reflect the policies or positions of any institutions with whom he is currently or has previously been associated.
Sam Momah, Nigeria Beyond Divorce: Amalgamation in Action, xxiii-xxvii (2013)
Nathaniel Irobi, “Hunger, Poverty Now National Security Threats, Says Defence Chief”, Elanza News, 23 June 2025, available at https://elanzanews.ng/hunger-poverty-now-national-security-threats-says-defence-chief/
Ernest Rennan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882), cited in T. Baycroft, Nationalism in Europe, 1989-1945, 32 (1998)
Id.
A.V. Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, (J.W.F. Allison, Ed.), (Oxford University Press, 2013) 1st edition.
Id.
Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to The Theory of Dictatorship, (E.A Shills, Trans), (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1941) 24-38.
See, Communication 294/04, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights & Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (On behalf of Andrew Barclay Meldrum) v. Zimbabwe, 3 Apr. 2009, para 119, https://www.ihrda.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/29404-ZLHR-IHRDA-v-ZIMBABWE-Meldrum-eng.pdf, accessed 3 October 2023.
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Diego García-Sayan, A/77/160, 8, para 34, (July 2022).
African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance (hereafter called “ACDEG”), adopted 30 Jan. 2007; entered into force, 15 Feb. 2012, https://au.int/sites/default/files/treaties/36384-treaty-african-charter-on-democracy-and-governance.pdf, accessed 30 Sept. 2023, Art. 17(2), (hereafter, called “ACDEG”). 12 Id., Article 32(3).
African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, adopted June 27, 1981, CAB/LEG/67/3 rev. 5, 21 I.L.M. 58 (hereafter called “African Charter”).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans, Norman K. Smith (1974), A/133/B/172
Cited in Anthony Kronman, The Lost Lawyer: Falling Ideals of the Legal Profession (1995), 45-46
Id., p. 14
See, General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, adopted 26 February, 1885, reprinted in 3 AJIL (Supplement), 7 (1909) (hereafter called “General Act of Berlin”)
Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004); 91
G.N. Uzoigwe, “Reflections on the Berlin West Africa Conference, 1884-85”, XII:3-4 Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 9 at 10 (1984-85)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, (J Sibree, Trans) (New York, American Dome Library Co, 1902), 150
Id., 157
General Act of Berlin, Art. 6
Sybil Crow, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885, (Longmans & Green London, 1942), 4-5
See, Elizabethaven Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History, (Johannesburg, Jacana Media, 2013)
See, Dominik Schaller, “Genocide and Mass Violence in the ‘Heart of Darkness’: Africa in the Colonial Period”, in Donald
Bloxham & A Dirk Moses (Eds), Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, (Oxford, Oxford Academic Books, 2012), 345; Jurgen
CD. 1809, Despatch to Certain of His Majesty’s Representatives Abroad in Regard to Alleged Cases of Ill-Treatment of Natives and to the Existence of Trade Monopolies in the Independent State of the Congo, Africa, No. 14 (1903) [House of Commons, Accounts and Papers, Vol. 62. 1904]
Re Southern Rhodesia, (1919) AC 212 at 215
Id.
Id., 232
Id., 233 31 Id.
The Privy Council almost certainly adapted this from Corinthians 5:17 (King James Version) 33 Re Southern Rhodesia, (n24), 235
League of Nations Covenant, Article 22
Id.
Charter of the United Nations, Art 76(b)
Lord Denning, “Legal Education in Africa: Sharing our Cultural Heritage,” 58 Law Society Gazette, 147 (1961)
S.A. de Smith, The Commonwealth and its Constitutions, (London: Stevens & Sons, 1964), 136
Julius Osahon, “Nigeria’s Legal System Crumbling under Corruption, Ethics Violations, Says Osinbajo”, The Guardian, 17 May 2025, available at https://guardian.ng/news/nigerias-legal-system-crumbling-under-corruption-ethics-violations-saysosinbajo/
International Commission of Jurists, African Conference on the Rule of Law, Lagos, Nigeria, January 3-7 1961: A Report on the Proceedings of the Conference, (Geneva, ICJ, 1961)
About the Author:
Chidi Anselm Odinkalu is a Nigerian human rights activist, lawyer, professor and writer. He was the former chairman of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and was recently the senior team manager for the Africa Program of Open Society Justice Initiative