Justice system is no doubt fraught with the challenges that discourage many people from taking their matters to court for adjudication due to the time-consuming nature of court proceedings.
In many instances, by the time the matter is determined by the court, the litigants may have completely lost interest or business/economic values have become irrecoverable, negating the benefits that the victor would have derived from court judgments.
In its original form, the judicial process is set up to work efficiently, but in reality, litigants exploit loopholes and deliberately frustrate other parties, and protract the matter for as long as possible.
Stakeholders said many factors are responsible for the delay experienced in the smooth, efficient, and quick disposal of cases. They said some of these factors are case specific, while others are systemic.
To avoid these undue delays and its negative consequences, an adjudicatory time frame was introduced for election petition matters. With this in mind, litigants and judges know that there is a time within which the matter must be concluded and they all work to meet that deadline.
Relatedly, in civil matters, frontloading of processes was introduced by some states like Lagos to hasten trial, while the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) attempted to regulate the number of adjournments that can be granted in criminal proceedings to forestall delays.
In all of those, there is no constitutional provision, stipulating that civil and criminal cases must terminate within a certain time from the date they are filed as in the case of political matters.
Many have rightly argued that politicians ensured the problem was fixed because election litigation concerns them most, while only the less-privileged and the poor languish in criminal trials.
According to stakeholders, some of the ways cases are prolonged is for counsel to adopt different delay tactics. The most common delay tactic, they noted, is the raising of preliminary objections challenging the jurisdiction of the trial court, mere irregularity, or they challenge the validity of a charge based on some perceived defects.
They pointed out that in the case of preliminary objections, the trial court is obligated to deliver its ruling on the objection one way or the other.
Where a preliminary objection fails, lawyers may further delay proceedings by appealing against the ruling of the trial court at the Appellate Court termed interlocutory appeals.
When interlocutory appeals are executed tactfully, it could end up stalling any real progress in the substantive matter for a number of years, particularly where stay of proceedings at the trial court is granted.
It is, therefore, advocated that in order to avoid mischievous use of the court process to frustrate proceedings, the court could consider each application before it on its merits and exercise its discretion judicially and judiciously by striking out/dismissing applications, which do not aid substantial justice.
According to sector observers, another weapon used by counsel to delay proceedings is the right to appeal, whether substantive or interlocutory.
Since an appeal does not automatically operate as a stay of proceedings of a court, an appellant desirous of appealing the judgment of a lower court must take a further step by filing an application to stay the proceedings complained against, pending the outcome of the appeal.
Lawyers acknowledged that delay in the judicial process is one of the most potent causes of disenchantment with the justice delivery system.
An Abuja-based lawyer, Emmanuel Ekwe said that there is no doubt that Nigeria’s legal system is abysmally slow in terms of justice delivery. He, however, disagrees that it is a problem of not apportioning timeframe to cases slated for adjudication.
According to him, the justice system will be in a deeper conundrum if we give a timeline within which criminal and civil matters are to be dispensed with in court. He said if judges stop sitting late and eskew granting frivolous applications aimed at securing unnecessary adjournments, the problem will be 80 per cent solved.
Ekwe stressed that the system will experience technical justice if a timeframe is adopted. “This is because some lawyers who obviously have bad cases will devise a way of dragging the matter till the set timeframe elapses. So, who suffers from it? Is it not the innocent party who has taken the matter to court? That is double jeopardy.
“So, it is my firm view that we should rather focus on practical, and implementable ideas, not a rehash of the problems.
“Lawyers and judges can curb the palaver of delayed justice by not necessarily imposing a timeframe but by diligently discharging their duties.
“Being that justice is not a one-way traffic, the practicability of giving timelines to civil and criminal cases in our courts is bleak and will be counterproductive,” he declared.
But a Lagos-based lawyer, Christian Oti, believes a legal framework for cases in Nigeria can work with an amendment of the various rules of court, or an enactment in that respect.
“Also, there should be a separation of the election petitions cases from the regular courts, because they hugely affect the other matters in courts in every election cycle. This is because election matters have been constitutionally constructed, so it will clog the timeframe for other suits if a specialised court is not created for it,” he stated.
The lawyer suggested that more judges should be employed for the adjudication of cases, because there would be much work for the judges, if cases are dealt with on a time frame basis.
According to him, if timeframes are to work with cases, judges must desist from agreeing to extension of time from lawyers without cogent reasons.
Agreeing with Oti, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Douglas Terkura Pepe, maintained that giving timeframe for civil and criminal cases will remove unnecessary delay in the litigation process. He stressed that it will make lawyers and the court sit up, exactly the same way they do in election matters that are time bound.