A Social Democracy Party (SDP) Presidential Aspirant, Prince Adewale Adebayo, has said that the nation cannot the desired development if it did not prioritize access to justice and peace.
Adebayo said this at a meeting with the delegates of the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) in Abuja on Monday night, said that the country needed help in ensuring that there was justice for all.
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According to him, if it pleased God and the Nigerians to give him the mandate to govern the country, he would work to make Nigeria the most just country in the world.
“The ingredients of doing justice starts from those who have access to state authority knowing that it is an agency and you are doing this work for the people.
“My measurement of how a country is doing is what happened to the ordinary people. There is a need to give people a new thought regarding justice. We need help in our access to justice not because we do not have the best lawyers but because the lowest people in my society do not have access to justice.
“At a point they were beginning to loss a sense of entitlement to justice, they created a different mentality for themselves that this people and their legal system and court system is not for us.
“Even we who believe in it sometimes spent 20 years in court litigating two paragraphs in an agreement. We spent 15 years determining whether someone is innocent or not. So it is not working for us.
“Our country will always know peace and be on the party if development when justice is available for,” Adebayo said.
He also said that justice is an ideal and cosmology as such the responsibility of everybody to promote, the way they fought for safe environment.
On her part, Nigeria Country Representative of HiiL, Ijeoma Nwafor who led the team said the outcome of her research so far exposed the weakness of justice served in Nigeria.
Also, the Founding Director of HiiL, Dr. Samuel Muller, said that they came to the conclusion that the 5.1bn people in the world did not have adequate access to Justice.
He said, “A little over 1 billion, people do not have a resolution for a civil administrative or criminal case that they have. That is an eighth percent of the population. When you look at our data, generally people who have Justice problems only about 30 percent of them get resolution, two-thirds are still walking around with the problem.”
