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A virtual hearing is a court hearing conducted by audio-visual means, where cases are conducted without the need for participants to attend the Court in person.1 The ... The Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad on the 23rd of March, 2020, issued Circular No. NJC/CIR/HOC/11631. The essence of the

The outbreak of COVID-19 brought about the hitherto uncommon practice of e-filing as well as the practice of virtual court proceedings in the Nigerian Judiciary in a bid to dispense with extremely urgent, essential, or time-bound matters. The Lagos State High Court had its first virtual or remote court hearing on May 4, 2020, where a driver, Olalekan Hameed, was tried, convicted, and sentenced ...

Abstract This article focuses on the legal framework on virtual court hearing in Nigeria. There is a vacuum in the Nigerian legal system that was brought to limelight during the Corona virus pandemic and this gap relates to the issue of justice being denied and delayed in times of emergency such as pandemic, war and even insecurity which halt the flow of human activities and smooth ...

Development of Virtual Hearing in Nigeria. Following the outbreak of COVID, one of the measures put in place to reduce the wild spread of the disease was a full lockdown. ... Chief Judge of Lagos State pursuant to the provisions of Section 6(6) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended), Order 49 Rules 1, 2 and 3 ...

3.1 The emergence and development of virtual court proceedings in Nigeria. The use of Audio Visual Links (AVL) or video conferencing pre-existed Covid-19 and dates back to the 1990s when AVL was adopted for expert and vulnerable witnesses. 16 As far back as 2010, the United Kingdom permitted defendants to take pleas virtually. 17 However, in Nigeria, the advent of VCP can be traced to 2020 ...

Virtual Court Proceedings and its implementation. Virtual proceedings are simply proceedings conducted without the need for participants to be physically present. With the proposed introduction of virtual means to judicial proceedings in Nigeria, court hearings are now to be conducted without the physical presence of lawyers and litigants.. The national courts in several countries all over the ...

Introduction. Recently, there have been increasing concerns as to the constitutionality of the current practice in some Nigerian courts embracing virtual hearing of cases, as these cases might be reversed or set-aside by the Supreme Court of Nigeria on the grounds that such hearings did not meet the constitutional requirement to determine these cases.

This paper seeks to explore the legal framework for virtual court hearing in Nigeria whilst elaborating on the rules governing virtual court hearing in other jurisdictions. The qualitative methodology is adopted in a bid to derive lessons from these jurisdictions and recommend legal reforms and/or amendments of laws for the proper functioning ...

Nigeria’s Maiden Virtual Court Session . The first virtual court sitting in Nigeria was held on May 4 2020, at the Ikeja High Court, Lagos. The outcome of that case was the sentencing to death of a driver, Olalekan Hameed, for the murder of 76-year old Mrs Jolasun Okunsanya, on December 1, 2018.

Virtual Hearing: Another key innovation of the New Rules is the introduction of provisions for virtual hearings. In what is almost the exact replication of the CA Rules’ provisions on virtual hearings, the New Rules authorize the Supreme Court to conduct proceedings virtually where it deems fit and make provisions for notification, dress code ...

provision in the substantive laws and rules that formed and govern the superior courts in Nigeria. Indeed, the entire gamut of the enabling laws and rules contemplates only physical hearing in public 3 in line with the provisions of the 1999 Constitution as amended 4 .

The paper inquires whether virtual hearing introduced in the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN), through its Practice Directions and Guidelines for Court Sitting 2020, as a result of the ...

In Nigeria, virtual court hearing are held via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meets, Skype for business as well as other video conferencing platforms designated by the court. 46 This seems to follow the model adopted in Singapore, 47 United Kingdom, 48 International Court of Justice 49 and Canada as part of its courts’ first response to the ...

FSenior Lecturer, Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria, Faculty of Law (Oleh Campus), Dept of Public Law. ABSTRACT In this paper, the legality of virtual courts at the time of COVID 19 pandemic is examined in relation to the right to a fair trial. Hearings that are held in virtual or remote courts take place

As you may be aware, Section 36(3) & (4) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as altered), provides for public hearing in the determination of cases, civil and criminal, respectively. In other words, in the hearing and determination of the rights of a citizen, the public must have access to the sitting of the court.

Furthermore, by reason of Order 6 rule 1 & 6,Order 11 rule 2(1) as well as paragraph 5 of the practice direction 2020, only the claimant and defendant’s telephone number and email address or those of the counsel are required to be endorsed on the processes. Of course, while the claimant is reasonably expected to know the contact address and ...

4.00 Do Virtual Court Proceedings pass the legal test for proceedings held in public? 4.01 Fidelis Nwadialo in his book, Civil Procedure in Nigeria, 2 nd Edition, posited at page 674 thereof that, “hearing in public entails a situation where the public is not barred… A trial is sufficiently public if members of the public may have access to ...

Several issues were raised around the workability of virtual arbitral hearing. A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) Chief Anthony Idigbe, wondered how a tribunal would manage party autonomy where a ...

Also, under the new rules, FHC judges cannot hear more than nine cases in a day. There were 36 Divisions of the court as at last July with 82 judges to hear over 200,000 pending cases.

It was the first time a defendant would appear remotely from prison via Zoom in Nigeria. The virtual hearing may have come to stay. ... Omoyinmi said since the rules allow for virtual hearings ...