The administration of criminal justice in Nigeria has been a major concern to citizens and other critical stakeholders as it relates to public safety, security and effective justice delivery system. Key concerns range from poor and untimely justice delivery, poor case management, delays in the adjudicatory process, inadequacy of police and judicial personnel, corruption, human rights abuses, lack of modern information technology and weak coordination and cooperation amongst criminal justice institutions. To address the age long challenges in the criminal justice process, the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015 significantly alters the criminal justice process with a view to raising efficiency and effectiveness in the quality of justice delivery in Nigeria.
Despite the passage of the Act, the pace of its implementation remains slow with much of challenges linked to low level awareness about the Act amongst the civil populace and criminal justice actors/agencies whose service delivery and efficiency it seeks to improve. Additionally, limited efforts are known to have been undertaken and/or put in place to closely monitor the Administration of Criminal Justice reform process, its key actors/agencies and the fulfilment of their new roles under the Act.
The Project on Monitoring the Criminal Justice Administration Reform Process in Nigeria therefore seeks to contribute to strengthening the implementation of ACJA 2015 in Nigeria through systematically monitoring the key criminal justice actors as it relates their compliance with the Act and driving advocacy to ensure the fulfillment of their roles as required under the ACJA 2015.
The project currently enjoys the buy-in of the Administration of Criminal Justice Monitoring Committee(ACJMC), National Human Rights Commission, relevant Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Actors, and CSOs.
Nigeria continues to play host to myriad of conflicts and ethno-religious crises since the return to democracy in 1999 after long years of military rule riddled with violent/non-violent coup de’tats. These crises range from the activities of the Niger Delta militants in the South South, the Fulani herdsmen-local farmers conflicts in the North West and North Central zones and the activities of the dreaded Boko Haram insurgents across states in the North East of Nigeria. Indeed, the response of the Federal government to these conflicts and heightened insecurity situation is a deployment of military personnel over troubled civilian spaces.
With the long years of military domination, the continued deployment of military personnel to crisis-prone areas and an under-resourced police manpower, the implications have been poor civil-military relations and infractions and a general lack of cooperation between members of the public and the military personnel. The Civil Military Relations Project therefore seeks to foster national security, cohesion, accountability, respect for the rules of engagement and human rights of civilian and the Military.
This project is justified on the basis that it will initiate enabling environment and processes for various local and international stakeholders to evolve a framework that will bridge the existing communications gap between the military and turn current anti-military sentiments into public-military synergy of purpose as the success of deployed troops depends to a very large extent on the cooperation and information members of the public are willing share with them.
The CMR project currently enjoys the buy-in of the Departments of Civil Military Affairs of the Nigerian Army and the Nigerian Air Force, The Nigerian Bar Association, National Human Rights Commission, Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps, Institute of Peace and Conflict Resolution and other state and non-state actors.
Afrobarometer is a pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions, and related issues in more than 37 countries in Africa. The network started with round 1 survey in 1999 and covered 12 countries: Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Afrobarometer is undoubtedly the world’s leading research project on issues that affect ordinary African men and women. Since inception, the network has conducted 6 rounds of survey in 37 African countries including Nigeria.
The network operates with national partners in every country and since 2011, CLEEN Foundation has been the National partner involved in the supervision of the survey and quarterly dissemination of the findings drawn from the 36 states of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory. CLEEN Foundation partners with Afrobarometer in Nigeria to collect and publish high-quality, reliable statistical data on Nigeria which is freely available to the public. Through our findings, ordinary citizens in the rural and urban areas can have a voice in policy-making processes that affect their lives. http://www.afrobarometer.org/
Elections in Nigeria have been plagued with incidences of violence and irregularities, often involving officials of the electoral commission and security agencies. In CLEEN we recognize that free, fair and credible elections require the guarantee of the security of people and materials involved in the electoral process. On this premise, we developed the Election Security Management Project to advocate for coordination of security sector planning at the national/state level, to engage and train civil society groups to independently monitor police conduct, to expose the police to set standards for discharging their electoral functions, to document their performance and to hold them accountable to these standards.
We have sustained this commitment from the 2011 general elections, through the staggered gubernatorial elections that have been conducted in various states since then (Sokoto, Adamawa, Kogi, Cross Rivers, Edo, Ondo and Anambra States). As the countdown to the 2015 general elections begins, CLEEN continues to galvanize stakeholders in the electoral process in Nigeria to commence early preparations for the elections by periodically highlighting major threats to peaceful and credible conduct of the elections through its election security threat assessment conducted across the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria. The assessment covers such issues as level of preparations by INEC and security agencies for the elections, activities of political parties, aspirants/candidates, their supporters and other non-state actors that might breach the public peace before, during and after the elections, if unchecked.
The Project on Mobility and Security Challenges in West Africa is a research and advocacy project aimed at studying trends in migration and security management in 5 identified borders in West Africa. The goal of the project is to increase understanding of the trends and dynamics in mobility and the security of border in the region. The project is funded by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) through its New Executives Fund (NEF) initiative from June 2013 to June 2015. The project will conduct field studies and interviews with travellers, officials and other border users in land border crossings across the ECOWAS Co-Prosperity Alliance Zone (COPAZ) by singling out the borders between Nigeria and Benin; Benin and Togo; Togo and Ghana as well as in the Cote d’Ivoire migration corridor where we single out the borders between Cote d’Ivoire and Mali on the one hand and Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso on the other hand.
The project is one of CLEEN Foundation’s initiatives for developing the migration and securitization portfolio of work and serves as a crucial follow up to a number of earlier projects on migration and law enforcement in the sub-region. Project outputs are expected to include publication of research findings through policy briefs and a book as well as a number of advocacy outreaches to regional institutions and civil society organisations in the region. The second phase of the project is envisaged to significantly broaden CLEEN Foundation’s intervention on migration and mobility in West Africa.
Collective security is one of the most important strategies within community policing. Informal policing group is a vehicle for the delivery of functional and effective Community Policing. This is because they play important role in the safety and security needs of community members’ especially poor communities.
In an ideal situation, the informal policing group would play a low level role in ensuring safety and security of community members, with their main focus being on deterring crime rather than combating or taking on any of the more active ‘policing’ roles.
The purpose of this intervention therefore, is to support these groups to improve their services to all members of communities in a manner that is both accountable and respectful of the law, in close coordination with the Nigeria Police Force.
Through capacity building and facilitation of periodic community forums, community members, informal policing groups and the Nigeria Police Force at the Divisional level are able to productively engage one another to uncover and mobilize community assets, strengths, and resources to respond to safety and security needs.
Project Background: the project is aimed at building more accountable institutions in both Sierra Leone and Nigeria by enhancing institutional transparency and preventing impunity for those who engage in corruption and transnational organized crime (TOC). The project seeks address gap in the justice process through support to local organizations and the media and raising awareness of the costs of corruption by highlighting injustices and cases of impunity to create a less favorable environment for both organized crime and corruption.
The project involves greater push for governmental transparency to complement the recent legal advancement in Nigeria (FOIA) and through trainings, it focus on developing specific strategies for approaching and monitoring magistrate-level courts that deals most commonly with TOC and corruption cases. Capacities of staff in some government agencies will also be built to be able to respond to FOI request. It will also implement a series of cost of corruption workshops, build media capacity on the principles of investigative journalism and offering them soft grants and series of projects to create avenue for making government institution transparent and accountable to members of the public.
Stopthebribes is a project being implemented by CLEEN Foundation in collaboration with the Nigeria Police Force with support from the Justice 4 All (DFID) and Canadian High Commission. The project is hinged on a user-friendly website available on www.stopthebribes.net. The website is linked with social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook that enable automatic and integrated conversion of received messages on a map showing exploitation spots in Nigeria. The Stopthebribes project is a continuation of CLEEN Foundation’s work to promote public officials (especially law enforcement) accountability.
Components of project
a) Allows victims and/or witnesses to simply report incidents of extortion and bribery by using mobile phones to call, send text messages, emails or make direct entries on the website, including uploading videos or photographs of such incidents.
b) Displays each report as a location-specific point on a map of Nigeria, and thus helps in tracking cases of low level corruption by law enforcement and public officials.
c) Creates a police corruption map that would provide data on corruption hotspots which would guide police authorities on where to deploy more resources in fighting low level corruption within the police
Theft of oil costs oil companies, governments (and the communities they serve) hundreds of millions of dollars each year in Nigeria alone. In addition to loss of revenue, oil theft fuels violence and insecurity, feeds corruption, finances the purchase of weapons, corrupts youth, escalates youth unemployment, causes environmental pollution and destabilizes communal life.
The concept of oil certification follows the success of the “conflict diamonds” initiative and aims to hit the well-organised theft of oil by choking off the market for the stolen oil and interrupting the supply chain.