From Adetutu Folasade-Koyi, Abuja
The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) is partnering with the Ministries of Justice, the judiciary and other stakeholders to fast-track access to justice in Nigerian communities.
The Netherlands-based Institute is an organisation dedicated to ensuring that justice is accessible, affordable and easy to understand with multiple programmes in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Netherlands, Iraq and Syria.
In Nigeria, HiiL has pilot projects in communities in three zones of the Federation, including Imo (South East), Ogun (South West) and Kaduna (North West). There are plans to cover others zones in future.
In April 2023, HiiL launched its Justice Needs and Satisfaction Nigeria Report, and based on the survey interviews with 6,573 Nigerians from all over the country, the report showed that legal problems are a common experience for Nigerians and that the majority of these problems are dealt with outside the formal justice problem.
In its survey, over 101 million problems were resolved while 61 million problems are ongoing and 22 million were abandoned.
At an interactive session with bureau chiefs, editors and media managers in Abuja, at the weekend, HiiL CEO based in Netherlands, Udo Ilo, disclosed that, HiiL’s Justice Needs and Satisfaction (JNS) in Nigeria report showed that “81 percent of Nigerians had experienced one or more legal problems in the past year, with many of them facing more than just one problem.”
In the follow-up survey in 2024, “over half of the people who did not report legal problems in the first survey experienced legal problems, meaning that over a longer period of time, even more people encounter legal problems more than 81 percent reported in 2023. To make justice systems work for everyone, we partner with ministries of Justice (across states), judiciaries and other stakeholders to identify justice delivery, designing solutions and implementation in ways that fit different contexts and needs.”
The HiiL report showed that most serious problems bedevilling Nigerian communities are land problems, domestic violence, neighbour disputes, housing, crime, money, employment, family, law enforcement, social welfare, consumer problems, corruption, accident and documentation.
According to the Country Representative, Ijeoma Nwafor, who also addressed participants at the event, “the most serious problems are land disputes, neighbour disputes and domestic violence.” Land issues alone account for 18 percent of problems that affect Nigerian communities.
Nwafor added that “Nigeria is moving towards people-centred justice in important ways. This is especially true for justice sector professionals and political leaders working together in three states, Imo, Ogun and Kaduna.”