Professors of law at the Nigeria Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, NIALS, yesterday called on the National Assembly to commence the process of repealing the death penalty in the country's laws.
The professors led by the NIALS Director-General, DG, Prof. Epiphany Azinge (SAN), also asked the parliament to legislate for the justiciability of Chapter Two of the 1999 Constitution to guarantee all the rights enshrined in the chapter for the citizenry.
The NIALS professors made call during a courtesy call on the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Aminu Waziri Tambuwal.
"We the Nigeria Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, NIALS, seek an abrogation of the death penalty in all our laws. It is a matter of despair to hear that people still clamour for death penalty in the states," Azinge said.
The NIALS DG, who congratulated the House of Representatives for the "people-centred bills," and "the sheer number of bills passed in the last two years" by the Lower Chamber under Tambuwal's leadership, also urged the speaker, who is also a lawyer, to "identify more with the institute" in the efforts to rid the country of regressive and outdated laws.
Azinge, however, noted that the National Assembly, despite its efforts in lawmaking in the last two years, needed more capacity building in the area of law drafting. He acknowledged that though "there is a National Institute of Legislative Studies," the NIALS also had as part of its mandate to build capacity on law drafting. The DG said though the House had passed many bills, "some of the legislations are not evidencebased".
He said: "The institute has done extensive work on chapter two to make it justiciable. We only want to add our voices to what the National Assembly is already doing."
Azinge also presented several books to Tambuwal on the legal profession in Nigeria since 1914, state of emergency and politics, legislative drafting and other seminal works on key legal areas.
In his response, the speaker told the visiting team that the House was already in the process of abrogating some archaic laws and had even restructured the Committee on Justice to carry out the assignment.
Tambuwal appealed to Azinge and his team to assist the committee in the task of amending some of the laws and abrogating a few others.
National Mirror