The 2027 Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, Prince Adewole Adebayo has promised to overhaul the Nigerian Criminal system in a way that protects the innocent but punishes the culpable.
He made this declaration in Lagos on Thursday at an annual lecture organised by a foremost Human Rights organisation in Nigeria, the Committee for The Defence of Human CDHR, titled “Understanding Human Rights Beyond Emotions and Personal Interests.”
In his own goodwill address delivered on his behalf by Comrade Mark Adebayo, his Campaign’s Chief Media and Communications Adviser, which he titled “The Counter-Intuitive Architecture of Human Rights”, Prince Adewole Adebayo stated, inter alia, that:
“It’s just unfortunate that those who administer Nigeria’s criminal justice system are often adjudged, rightly or wrongly, criminals by the society. This diminishes trust in the system and consequently creates a dangerous culture of self-help because the current system helps rich criminals and corrupt public officials to escape justice while the innocent or a petty criminal whole steal a one thousand Naira bread is sentenced to 10 years in jail. The one who steals Trillions from the treasury is taken to and from court in luxury jeeps. Our administration will overhaul Nigeria’s criminal system in a way that ensures equal delivery of justice, punishes criminals and protect the innocent and the poor. We cannot have a criminal justice system run by criminals.”
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Being The Text Of An Address By Prince Adewole Adebayo, the Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party at the All Activists Congress organised by the Committee for The Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) held at the Airport Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos on 15th Day of October, 2026
Comrades, learned colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.
It would have been a great honor for me to be personally present here today. It would have afforded me the opportunity to interact with my primary constituency of activism. But this event coincided with an event already scheduled months ago.
Therefore, I decided to send our campaign’s Spokesperson, Comrade Mark Adebayo, who is also an activist of considerable standing to deliver this short address on my behalf, because this occasion does not call for a disquisition. Kindly accept my sincere apologies.
It gladdens my heart to know that the current leadership of the Committee for The Defence of Human Rights (CDHR ) is headed by one of its founding activists – Comrade Debo Adeniran.
I congratulate the CDHR for staying the course from its dicey days of Free Femi Aborishade to its current stature of an icon of Human Rights activism in Nigeria. As we say, aluta continua…vitoria certa.
Permit me to interrogate the substantive theme under the topic: “The Counter-Intuitive Architecture of Human Rights”
Human Rights are designed to protect the individual precisely when it is most unpopular to do so. In contemporary discourse, Human Rights are frequently reduced to sentimental platitudes or weaponised as instruments of personal interest.
However, the true architecture of Human Rights is neither emotional nor utilitarian. It is a rigorous, counter-intuitive legal framework designed to insulate foundational liberties from the shifting sands of public passion and majoritarian tyranny.
To understand Human Rights in their truest sense, we must transcend the visceral reactions of empathy or indignation. We must view them through the prism of deontology – the philosophical position that certain actions are inherently right or wrong, independent of their consequences. Human Rights do not exist to validate our collective moral comfort.
They exist to enforce structural discipline upon the state and the community.
As the eminent legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin famously conceptualised in ‘Taking Rights Seriously’, rights must be understood as “political trumps” held by individuals:
“Individuals have rights when, for some reason, a collective goal is not a sufficient justification for denying them what they wish, as individuals, to have or to do, or not a sufficient justification for imposing some loss or injury upon them.”
II. The Doctrine of Procedural Universality
To separate Human Rights from raw emotion, the law employs a specialised taxonomy. This vocabulary ensures that justice is administered via institutional mechanics rather than visceral impulses. At the heart of this framework lie several core legal doctrines:
Juris et de jure (Of law and from law): Human Rights operate as irrebuttable presumptions of inherent dignity that cannot be overcome by the gravity of an alleged crime.
As a lawyer, I am aware of the common public misconception that defending a criminal means endorsing the crime. Legally, a defence lawyer’s role is not to prove that the client is factually “innocent” or morally good. Rather, their job is to serve as a check on state power and hold the prosecution to its absolute burden of proof: proving the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. If the state violates constitutional rights or provides flawed evidence, the lawyer’s duty is to expose those flaws.
Procedural due process is the structural guarantee that the state must respect all legal rights owed to a person, balancing the power of law of the land. It demands that justice be blind to the emotional weight of the offense.
Audi alteram partem (i.e. hear the other side) is the legal principle that dictates that no person shall be judged unheard. This principle ensures that regardless of how heinous a crime appears, the accused possesses an absolute right to a robust defense irrespective of public sentiments.
Hostis humani generis (Enemy of all mankind): Even when an individual is categorised under international law as Hostis humani generis (an enemy of civilisation, such as terrorists, bandits, kidnappers – all so prevalent in our country today due to government complicity and cluelessness – pirates, or perpetrators of genocide), they do not forfeit their right to a fair hearing and just trial. They merely shift the venue of their accountability.
When a society demands that an individual be stripped of these protections because their alleged actions are “monstrous,” the society attempts to replace de jure protections with de facto emotional vetoes.
III. The true metric of a society’s commitment to Human Rights is not how it treats its saints, but how it treats its perceived monsters. When lawyers defend notorious criminals, they are not endorsing the crime; they are defending the integrity of the legal system itself. If the state can bypass the rule of law to convict a villain, it gains the precedent to bypass the rule of law to convict the innocent.
Let me cite just three examples of pivotal historical intersections of advocacy and animosity:
1. John Adams and the Boston Massacre (1770);
Before he became the second President of the United States, John Adams took the deeply unpopular case of defending British soldiers who fired into a crowd of American colonists, killing five. Amidst a raging tide of colonial anger and patriotism, Adams secured acquittals for the majority of the soldiers. He famously declared to the jury:
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be any our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence… [The law] is deaf, inexorable, inflexible.”
2. Irving Erdheim and the Defense of Nazi Bundists;
In the mid-20th century, Jewish American lawyers frequently found themselves bound by professional ethics to defend the free speech and due process rights of American Nazi sympathisers. They recognised that if the state were granted the power to censor hate speech based on its offensive content, that same power could easily be inverted to censor marginalised minorities.
3. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY);
In the trials of figures like Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, assigned defense counsel faced immense global scorn. Yet, their rigorous cross-examinations and insistence on procedural perfection were vital. Without a fierce defense, these tribunals would have devolved into mere show trials or victor’s justice. The defense lawyers served as the guardians of the tribunal’s legitimacy.
As Lord Brougham articulated in his famous 1820 defense of Queen Caroline, the duty of an advocate often requires a total detachment from personal or national interest:
“An advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, amongst them, to himself, is his first and most distinguished duty.”
IV. Beyond Personal Interest: The Social Contract
Human Rights are frequently misunderstood as a blank check for individualism. In reality, they form the bedrock of the social contract. When we protect the rights of an individual with whom we vehemently disagree, we are protecting a systemic shield that covers us all.
If Human Rights were contingent upon good behavior, public utility, or political alignment, they would cease to be rights and become mere privileges revocable by whoever holds power.
The late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter captured this ethos precisely in McNabb v. United States (1943):
“The history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards. And the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”
It’s just unfortunate that those who administer Nigeria’s criminal justice system are often adjudged, rightly or wrongly, criminals by the society. This diminishes trust in the system and consequently creates a dangerous culture of self-help because the current system helps rich criminals and corrupt public officials to escape justice while the innocent or a petty criminal whole steal a one thousand Naira bread is sentenced to 10 years in jail. The one who steals Trillions from the treasury is taken to and from court in luxury jeeps. Our administration will overhaul Nigeria’s criminal system in a way that ensures equal delivery of justice, punishes criminals and protect the innocent and the poor. We cannot have a criminal justice system run by criminals.
In conclusion, the dispassionate horizon to mature in our understanding of Human Rights requires an intellectual ascension. We must separate our valid, human emotional responses to tragedy and crime from the clinical, structural necessities of justice.
Human Rights are not a reward for virtue. They are the systemic architecture that prevents humanity from sliding back into arbitrariness and tribalism. True fidelity to Human Rights demands that we stand firm in the defense of process, even when our emotions beg us to tear it down.
There was no government that harassed, arrested, and imprisoned Gani Fawẹhinmi more than General Babangida’s junta. But I can bet with a reasonable percentage of certainty tha, if Chief Ganiyu Oyeṣọla Fawehinmi were to be alive today and Babangida were to suffer unjust treatments from the government of the day, Gani would be the first to stand in his defense. Because, by so doing, he wouldn’t be defending an erstwhile dictator, but the noble dictates and principles of the universality of Human Rights.
That is why when we go on protests, the police or soldiers will shoot us. But the following day we’re back in the street protesting against the non-payment of their salaries and gratuities. Human Rights activism, by nature, should be emotionally detached from personal interests.
However, let’s briefly hold a mirror to our faces; is the activism of today reminiscent of yesteryear’s altruistic struggles? Has the activism of today not been infected with gratuitous prebendalism? Those are loud questions that deserve the quiet answers of our individual conscience and consciousness.
The atrocious governance atmosphere in which Nigeria has found itself in the last decade especially, cries for a massive Human Rights intervention from the Civil Society.
Nigeria has approximately 18.3 million out-of-school children, I’m yet to see a direct or significant public action intervention by Nigeria’s activists on that.
Our electoral processes are being compromised by clearly unconstitutional legislations, but the Civil Society’s interventions have been, at best, ephemeral. Some months ago, we protested on the streets of Abuja against the satanic Electoral Acts pushed down our throats by the current rubber-stamp National Assembly that is a mere extension of Tinubu’s on your mandate they shall fall, we were brutally teargassed. That protest should not have been a one-off action. We expected bigger solidarity from the Civil Society but it never came.
Today, frustrated citizens who are exercising their full constitutional rights of peaceful protests and expressing their anger against this failed government are being hounded down and jailed, the civil society needs to rise up in their defence via mass actions.
It is clear that the current administration knows that it cannot win the 2027 elections on a free, fair, and credible template. That’s why they have marshalled a comprehensive rigging machine. They can’t even face Nigerians to campaign with their horrific records. That’s why President Tinubu declared yesterday that he is sending his campaign council to go and face the anger of the people while he stays behind the thick walls of Aso Villa.
We in this community of activists will bear the worst blame of historic dimensions if we fail to stop the recycling of retrogressive leadership in this country.
Our most noble responsibility as activists in the current dispensation on the African continent, particularly in Nigeria, is to lead a process that will ensure that the people have the freedom to choose who leads them without the tragic manifestation of “authority stealing” of their votes as loudly enunciated by late Abàmì ẹda, Fẹla Anikulapo Kuti.
I rest my case.
