Justice A. O. Onovo of the Enugu State High Court yesterday voided the 2017 proscription of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) which led to the separatist group being declared a terrorist organisation by the federal government.
Mr Aloy Ejimakor, counsel for IPOB and its detained leader, Mr Nnamdi Kanu, disclosed this in a statement.
According to the release, the judge declared that the reliance on Nigeria’s Terrorism Prevention Act and the administrative action of the South-east Governors’ Forum and the federal government to proscribe IPOB contravene Section 42 of the Nigerian Constitution which prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity.
Recall that in 2017, the South-East Governors Forum, led by former the former governor of Eboyin State, Mr David Umahi of Ebonyi State, issued a proscription of IPOB activities, a move which ultimately led to the federal government classifying IPOB as a terrorist organisation.
Kanu through his counsel filed a suit against the Nigerian government and the South-East Governors’ Forum seeking a reversal of the proscription.
Other respondents were the president, the Attorney general of the federation, and the governor of Ebonyi State.
Ejimakor and five other lawyers represented Mr Kanu, while the respondents were represented by Simon Enoch.
Delivering judgement in the matter, Onovo held that the proscription of IPOB was also a violation of Kanu’s fundamental rights as enshrined under Articles 2,3,19 and 20 of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (Enforcement and Ratification) Act.
The court, which ordered the Nigerian government to publicly apologise to Kanu, declared that self-determination is not a crime, and therefore, cannot be used as a basis to arrest, detain and prosecute the IPOB leader.
It ordered the federal government and the other respondents to jointly pay Kanu N8 billion as damages for the physical, mental, emotional, psychological, property and other damages he suffered as a result of the infringements of his fundamental rights.
Addressing journalists after the court’s verdict, Ejimakor said IPOB did not go to court to contest the judicial proscription “but the executive action taken before the judicial decision because such actions are prohibited under Section 42 of the Nigerian Constitution.”
He said IPOB caters for the interest of the Igboland but the government singled it out for proscription.
“There is a proliferation of ethnic organisations, some of them are very evidently violent. But the federal government never took any step at all to either proscribe any one of them or to declare any one of them a terrorist group, but it took these proactive steps, supported by South-east governors, in targeting IPOB particularly.
“You can make this allegation in the media and beer parlours but if you don’t take them to court to be adjudicated, they remain mere allegations. So we decided to test the wrongness or rightness of this action taken against IPOB in court. And we did, and we prevailed,” he added.
With Premium Times report
