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From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
Relief has come the way of over 60,000 awaiting trial inmates in Nigeria as the United States Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), in conjunction with the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), has deployed equipment worth millions of dollars to five Nigerian universities to offer pro-bono services to prison inmates.
The benefiting schools include Veritas, Philomath, Baze, Nile, and the University of Abuja.
Speaking to newsmen after inspecting the newly deployed equipment, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of PPDC, Lucy James Obagi, said that the aim is to strengthen the paralegal capacity of law clinics while ensuring they are better equipped to serve pretrial detainees and provide high-quality paralegal services.
Among the items delivered, she said, are smart boards, conference tables and chairs, bookshelves, filing cabinets, public address systems, computers, printers, digital cameras, and inverters.
“It’s important we understand the role of clinicians in law students to understand the ethics of pre-legal students to prison inmates. Looking at the number of awaiting trial inmates, which is above 60,000, you can see that we need more of our legal services to fast-track the release of people on awaiting trial. So, we hope that we can use this methodology to train more clinicians to interface with people awaiting trials in prisons and provide pro-bono services to them.
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“We want to ensure that in the next few years, at least the number of people in prisons will have dropped by at least 30 per cent. We want to say thank you to INL for supporting the project—for supporting us and working with us for two years plus. They keep supporting us, hoping that the justice system in Nigeria is restored,” she said.
According to Obagi, Abuja alone is benefiting four law clinics, and the project, which is expected to last until 2027, will be expanded to 10 ivory towers in the country.
“In total, we are expanding this to 10 law clinics in project states. They are Kaduna, Nasarawa, Lagos, and Abuja. I think one is in Adamawa State. While Philomath University has about 30 law clinicians, UniAbuja has about 40 students providing pro-bono services. We are not paying them, but they are handling cases and providing community services to people to make sure that more people are not thrown into prisons,” she said.
Receiving the items, the Dean of the Faculty of Law, UniAbuja, Professor Uwakwe Abugu, rated the law students of UniAbuja highly in terms of offering pro-bono services.
“On the aspect of productivity, our students have been found worthy. You are going to find more worthy students because what we give them here is exposure for civil society advocacy. In Nigeria, as a third-world country, we can’t do much in legal practice without a deep knowledge of law and practice of access to justice.
“When we went to the Ilorin Conference, I was telling them that it’s not just enough to be lawyers or professors of law. What has the public benefited from the profession of law? You have been a professor of law of contract or law of tort for 15 years, 20 years; you are retiring, but the poor man in the village has not been able to be advised or helped to achieve one aspect of justice relating to your law of tort or law of contract. We can’t do it without starting from our students in the university. So, what we are doing today is remarkable because certainly, Nigeria needs more access to justice lawyers and civil society lawyers,” he said.
