Public Interest Litigation in Nigeria Assessing Impact, Opportunities and Challenges

Last week Friday was an engaging evening as we discussed #PublicInterest #Litigation in #Nigeria assessing #impact #opportunities and #challenges. The conversation hosted is as part of our #ImpactConversationSeries that featured a panel of foremost public interest lawyers in Nigeria including

Mojirayo Ogunlana-Nkanga, Principal Partner, MON Legal
Kolawale Oluwadare (Assistant Director, Socio-Economics Rights and Accountability Project, SERAP; Solomon Okedara(Co-Founder, Digital Rights Lawyers Initiative, Hameed Ajibola (Legal Practitioner, Social Justice Activist and moderated by our own Roseline Okoro (Legal Commons Program Associate, Citizens Common International)

It was an engaging evening reflecting on some of the gains on public interest litigation in Nigeria so far, especially in areas of #digitslrights #humanrights #governmentaccountability #checkandbalance #civicprotections #judicialactivism and #accesstojustice, we discussed some landmark cases, #keystrategies and possible implications for increased public interest cases especially in the time on closing civic space and growing human rights violations, insecurities and many more.

The discussants highlighted challenges limiting the potential of public interest cases in Nigeria, such as #enforcement of judgment across the different levels of government; #cost of litigation, speed of hearing cases in our extremely slow #judicial system, #locusstandi #capacitygap, and more.

The panel and audience contributors outlined some of the potentials of public interest litigation in a developing nation like ours, how we can use the power of PIL to strengthen our political systems, advance #humanrights #accesstojustice, increase political accountability, and more.

As an organization, we remain grounded in the potential of the law to advance social change and social justice and we are committed to advancing collaborative ideas, practices, and solutions to empower our legal community to be able to do more in this area.