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By Henry Uche
Civil Society Organisations, including Amnesty International-Nigeria, House of Justice, BudgIT, Atrocities Watch Africa, Enough Is Enough, Connected Advocacy, Yiaga Africa, and 92 others, have condemned the arrest, detention, persecution, and torture of Mr. Dele Farotimi.
In a statement signed by the civil society organisations, the group said while the court sitting in Ekiti has granted him bail, they maintain that the manner of his arrest was an aberration and that Mr. Farotimi should never have been subjected to the criminal justice process in this case.
More so, they explained that the prohibitive terms of bail for what is supposed to be a misdemeanour raise the real possibility that Mr. Farotimi’s right to be tried—as required by Nigeria’s constitution—a court constituted in such a manner as to guarantee its independence and impartiality cannot be guaranteed.
“There are many troubling aspects of Mr. Farotimi’s most recent encounter with Nigerian law enforcement, beginning with the unnecessarily aggressive and confrontational manner in which the arrest was effected. The CCTV footage released by his office after his arrest revealed the thoroughly unprofessional and violent nature of the police officers who crossed state lines to arrest him. The officers were not dressed in uniform and could have passed as armed thugs. They also threatened Mr. Farotimi’s staff for no reason after unlawfully seizing their phones. The brutal manner of his arrest suggests the apprehension of a bandit on a most-wanted list rather than a publicly accessible human rights lawyer,” they stressed.
The CSOs affirmed that even more troubling than the manner of the arrest was, the reason adduced, saying: “Before he was unlawfully ‘picked up’ from his office on the 2nd of December, Mr Farotimi had foretold the Nigerian public of his impending arrest. In a press release that went out from his office a day before, he stated that the police had invited him to answer for certain claims he had made in his most recent book titled “Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System.”
“Mr. Farotimi went on to state that his impending arrest was being orchestrated by 2 powerful individuals: Tony Elumelu and Chief Afe Babalola CFR, SAN, who were apparently displeased with the unflattering depictions Mr. Farotimi had made of them in his book. Rather than challenging his claims by suing him for defamation in civil court, they decided to wield their enormous influence to have him arrested, detained, and charged in court for a crime that does not exist in the jurisdiction of his arraignment.
“Defamation is a civil matter and should be treated as such. Section 4 of the Police Act 2020 clearly forbids the police from wading into civil matters. In an orderly society built on the rule of law, those contending the veracity or otherwise of the claims Mr. Farotimi made in his book or who feel he has defamed them in any of his writings or speech would seek justice in the civil court, where Mr. Farotimi would have had to defend his claims or provide redress should he have been found to have maligned their character. In the process, the resources of the Nigerian state, our law enforcement agents, and our criminal justice system should not be trivialised and expended on pursuing personal vendettas. When a person feels that his or her reputation has been tarnished, the law creates opportunities for redress in civil court.
“As Nigeria’s Supreme Court pointed out in 2021, criminal defamation was invented by the ‘Star Chamber” in late mediaeval England. That is why it has been written out of the law in most states in Nigeria as well as in many more Commonwealth countries. It should have no place in the books of a Republic.
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They said another worrisome aspect of the case was that the police charged Mr. Farotimi before a magistrate court in Ekiti State on 16 counts of criminal defamation. However, the crime of criminal defamation is unknown to the Ekiti State’s Criminal Law of 2021, which currently spells out the criminal law regime in Ekiti State. Moreover, it also does not exist in the Criminal Code of Lagos, where Mr. Farotimi resides, works, presumably wrote his book, and was abducted.
“Our Constitution provides in Section 36(12) that “subject as otherwise provided by this Constitution, a person shall not be convicted of a criminal offence unless that offence is defined and the penalty, therefore, is prescribed in a written law.
Other individuals and groups signatories to the statement were Professor Chidi Anslem Odinkalu, who was the former executive chairman of the National Human Rights Commission; the Centre for Social Justice; We The People; the Kukah Centre; the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD); Fight Against Corruption in the Judiciary; Global Rights; Human & Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA); West African Drug Policy Network (WADPN); Women in Media Communication Initiative (WIM); Policy Alert, Media Rights Agenda; TechHerNG; Accountability Lab; African Centre for Media and Information Literacy (AFRICMIL); ACE-Nigeria; Advocacy Centre for Development, among others.
According to them, “The Nigerian Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed this canonical provision as the anchor of our criminal jurisprudence, so we are left to wonder under which powers the court in Ekiti presumed to order the remand of Mr. Farotimi. Moreover, the act of charging Mr. Farotimi before the Magistrate Court for a “crime” that the Court clearly did not have jurisdiction to entertain is an abuse of legal processes. The police should immediately drop the charges against Mr. Farotimi, and he should be immediately released without preconditions.
They request that the Attorney General of Ekiti State should step in immediately to officially discontinue the case against Mr. Farotimi if the police do not act fast enough in doing so.
They also demanded that laws that support criminal defamation in Nigeria’s criminal jurisprudence should be immediately repealed and cases initiated under those laws should be struck out by the courts.
“The Inspector-General of Police should issue a force-wide order directing the police to cease effecting arrests premised on defamation. The Nigerian police need to stop being a willing tool of the powerful to oppress law-abiding citizens.
“Those who feel that Mr. Farotimi wrongfully tarnished their reputations with the claims he made in his book should seek redress in civil court. We take this opportunity to call on law enforcement agencies to uphold their constitutional mandate to serve and protect citizens, rather than act as tools for the powerful to silence dissent. As the world marks International Human Rights Day, we commit to emphatically stressing the urgent need for reforms to protect free expression and ensure accountability for state overreach,” they added.
