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From Adanna Nnamani, Abuja
In order to prevent the frequent jail breakouts happening across the nation, a legal firm, Greylaw practice Limited Partners has urged the federal and state governments to decongest correctional facilities.
The law team also recommended adopting Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in settlement of conflicts as a way to reduce the case load for judges to afford them adequate time to focus on serious cases.
The principal partner, and Chairman, Board of Trustees of the legal consulting firm, Edward Omaga spoke to Journalists Friday, in Abuja at the unveiling of its newly rebranded face.
He said the firm, haven operated for 10 years, was recently upgraded to accommodate expansion in different practice areas and to serve different categories of clients both locally and internationally.
According to him, “Decongesting the prison is what we should be doing now. We believe that you solve a problem before it arrives by preventing it. For instance, for somebody who has spent five years awaiting trial for stealing bicycle, how do you reconcile that? And another politician is released from prison after three months, either because of no conviction, or no case to substantiate. These are because of plea bargain.
“The young man who is in prison for five years because he steals a motorbike, or bicycle is so angry that he could do anything, even in the prison. And that is why you hear of jailbreak. But if a man goes into prison awaiting trial, and in the next three months, his case is decided he’s either convicted or released to go free. There won’t be a need to worry.
“For instance, the prison have had criminals are taking a young man who fought at with someone is kept on prison with terrorists, rapists. The tendency is that after a very short while, the young man who went as an innocent person to prison becomes a criminal. I can assure you that what they’re discussing prison is beyond what we can say here in the prison. They do all manner of things, all manner of atrocities because the system is loose. This is because you can imagine the people making phone calls right from the prison, so that is a level of rot we’re talking about. So unless we decongest prison, we’ll be having 1000 People in the prison that we should have 300 people, then there is hygiene, health and jailbreak problem”.
In cases when lawyers are accused of facilitating corruption and money laundering, he asserted that politicians should be held accountable for the crime instead of the attorneys.
The current administration, according to him, has a better understanding of the idea of the separation of powers and upholding the rule of law.
” I will agree with you that there are some cases that lawyers were involved in either money laundering or whatsoever. But I can also tell you that there are too many lawyers who are doing well in practice. If you say a lawyer is involved in money laundering, the question you should ask is who gave him the money to launder.
“I think we should be talking about the politicians who give money to a lawyer or give whatever brief to a lawyer to use it as a way of laundering money. But by and large, we advocate that lawyers are the engineers and touch bearers of the society. Omaga added.
He said the company was helping to promote good governance in the nation and revealed that many cases involving violations of human rights are handled by the company in the interest of justice.
He explained: “One of the fundamental things we do in this chamber is what we call public interest litigation. It goes to show that we are development and transparency. How do we make the society a better place for people to live in? So most times, you’ll see that people different types of cases, either for human rights sake, or cases, corruption or something of that nature, just to make sure that the country is on the pedestal of growth, stability and development, we handle that free of charge.
“From this office, lawyers are deployed to do a lot of work with government and private dealers to make sure that there is peace.”
