Fejiro Oliver
Exactly one year ago today, on October 6, 2025, the Chief Registrar of the ECOWAS Court of Justice signed a writ of execution and sent it to the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation in Abuja. The writ ordered Nigeria to carry out the court’s April 9, 2025 judgment striking down the death-penalty blasphemy provisions in the Kano State Penal Code and Sharia Penal Code Law of 2000. The Attorney-General, who stands as the competent national authority for executing the court’s judgments under Article 24(4) of the court’s Supplementary Protocol A/SP.1/01/05, was asked to report back to the court immediately after execution. Twelve months on, the provisions remain on the books. Nothing has been repealed, nothing amended. The writ sits unenforced, one entry in the largest backlog of ignored judgments in the ECOWAS community.
That backlog is Nigeria’s. The court’s Deputy Chief Registrar, Gaye Sowe, presented the enforcement statistics during the December 10, 2025 commemoration of World Human Rights Day. His figures: Nigeria had 125 cases before the court. Of these, 67 were dismissed, 10 were enforced, and about 50 remained unenforced, the biggest pile in the region. No other member state came close. Togo had 29 unenforced, Guinea 18, Côte d’Ivoire nine. Nine months later, an empirical audit of the court’s registry presented by former Registrar Anthony Anene-Maidoh at the court’s international conference in Dakar on September 24, 2026 found the same country at the bottom of the pile. As of March 16, 2026, Nigeria had enforced 10 of 60 judgments, a compliance rate of 16.6 percent, while 162 enforceable judgments sat unimplemented across the community.
Article 15(4) of the Revised ECOWAS Treaty says judgments of the court are binding on member states, community institutions, individuals and corporate bodies. Binding, in plain language, means they must be obeyed. Nigeria helped write that treaty. Nigeria hosts the court in Abuja. Yet the court’s own records show the host obeys fewer than one in six of the enforceable judgments against it.
ReportsNG has assembled, for the first time, a case-by-case register of the unenforced judgments against Nigeria drawn from the public record: suit numbers, dates, orders and the damages awarded. No consolidated Nigeria docket has ever been published. The court’s registry does not release one, and the Federal Ministry of Justice has never produced one. What follows is the verified sample, the first installment of the docket, with every gap marked.
Suit No. ECW/CCJ/APP/01/16, Judgment No. ECW/CCJ/JUD/23/16, delivered October 4, 2016: Col. Mohammed Sambo Dasuki (Rtd), the former National Security Adviser, sued Nigeria after he was arrested in November 2015, granted bail by three separate Nigerian courts, and rearrested each time. A three-member panel led by Justice Friday Nwoke declared the arrest, detention and continued detention unlawful and arbitrary, a mockery of democracy and the rule of law, violating his liberty under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The court ordered his immediate release, the return of all properties seized from his homes in Abuja and Sokoto in July 2015, and ₦15 million in damages. Dasuki was eventually released in December 2019. The ₦15 million was never paid. When Dasuki returned to the court to compel enforcement, the court in 2024 dismissed his enforcement application, ruling that it lacked jurisdiction to entertain it, a decision that effectively left the judgment debt orphaned. The unpaid ₦15 million, worth about $83,000 in 2016, remains outstanding [NEEDS DOC: evidence of any payment of the ₦15 million award since 2024].
Dorothy Njemanze and three others v. Nigeria, filed September 17, 2014, judgment delivered October 2017: Four Nigerian women, Dorothy Njemanze, Edu Okoro, Justina Etim and Amarachi Jessyford, were abducted, sexually assaulted, verbally abused and unlawfully detained by the Abuja Environmental Protection Board, police and military officials between 2011 and 2013 for being on the streets of Abuja at night, and branded prostitutes. The court found multiple violations of the African Charter, the Maputo Protocol on the rights of women, CEDAW, the ICCPR and the Convention Against Torture, the first time an international court pronounced on the Maputo Protocol. It awarded ₦6 million each to the 1st, 3rd and 4th plaintiffs, ₦18 million in total, dismissing the 2nd plaintiff’s claim as statute-barred. No public record shows the ₦18 million, or any part of it, was ever paid to the women [NEEDS DOC: counsel or victim confirmation of non-payment of the ₦18 million award].
Glory Okolie, judgments of November 21, 2024: The case of the 22-year-old arrested in Imo State in June 2021 by the Police Intelligence Response Team and held for 248 days without trial, used as a maid by officers, and released on March 23, 2022, produced the messiest paper trail in the register, and the figures in public reports conflict. The court’s communications division, in a statement issued after the November 21, 2024 judgment delivered by Justice Ricardo Cláudio Monteiro Gonçalves, said the court ordered Nigeria to pay Okolie ₦10 million for the violations and to cease all harassment, while an earlier 2022 ruling in the same matter had imposed a ₦1 million fine on the government for delaying proceedings. Separately, her lawyer Samuel Ihensekhien’s enslavement suit against the Nigeria Police Force, on which the court also ruled on November 21, 2024, was reported by multiple outlets as a ₦30 million reparation award. One online report headlined the total as ₦90 million, though its own breakdown of ₦10 million plus ₦1 million plus ₦30 million does not add up to ₦90 million. Taken together, the published reports put Okolie’s awards at ₦41 million, and the confusion itself is part of the story: nobody, not the court, not the government, has published a clean docket [NEEDS DOC: the November 21, 2024 judgment PDF(s) in Okolie’s suits to reconcile the ₦10 million, ₦30 million and ₦90 million figures].
Suit No. ECW/CCJ/APP/29/25, judgment delivered June 22, 2026: Journalist Jide Oyekunle, a reporter with Independent Newspaper and secretary of the FCT council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, was assaulted, detained for over eight hours and stripped of his camera and mobile phone by armed police officers on the orders of the then FCT Commissioner of Police, Benneth Igweh, while covering the #EndBadGovernance protests at Eagle Square, Abuja, on August 1, 2024. The court found Nigeria violated his freedom of expression under Article 9 of the African Charter, his personal liberty and dignity under Articles 5 and 6, and his property rights under Article 14, and ordered the government to pay ₦10 million in general damages. The case was brought by Avocats Sans Frontières France under its EU-supported eRIGHTS project. Three months after judgment, there is no public record that the ₦10 million has been paid [NEEDS DOC: counsel confirmation of non-payment of the ₦10 million award].
Expression Now Human Rights Initiative v. Nigeria, judgment delivered April 9, 2025: A three-judge panel unanimously declared Section 210 of the Kano State Penal Code and Section 382(b) of the Kano State Sharia Penal Code Law of 2000, both carrying the death penalty for blasphemy, excessive and disproportionate in a democratic society and incompatible with Nigeria’s obligations to protect freedom of expression under the African Charter and the ICCPR. The court ordered Nigeria to repeal or amend the provisions and similar laws elsewhere. The writ of execution went to the Attorney-General on October 6, 2025. One year later, no repeal or amendment has been recorded [NEEDS DOC: National Assembly and Kano State House of Assembly records on the repeal or amendment ordered in the April 9, 2025 judgment].
Add the verifiable awards together and the picture sharpens. The Dasuki ₦15 million, the Njemanze women’s ₦18 million, Okolie’s published awards totalling ₦41 million, and Oyekunle’s ₦10 million come to ₦84 million in outstanding court-ordered payments across just these cases, roughly $63,200 at the official exchange rate of about ₦1,330 to the dollar in October 2026. That is the unpaid bill for five files on a docket of fifty. The full liability across all fifty unenforced judgments has never been computed, because the full docket has never been published [NEEDS DOC: the complete Court Registry enforcement dataset for Nigeria showing all fifty unenforced judgments, their suit numbers, dates, orders and awards].
The architecture of defiance is simple. The court cannot compel execution itself. Under the Supplementary Protocol, execution runs through national systems, and Nigeria’s competent national authority is the Attorney-General of the Federation. The writ arrives in his office, and there it stalls. The 2025 Supplementary Act on the Community Court introduced an annual reporting requirement for national authorities on judgment enforcement. If the Attorney-General has filed such a report, it has not been published [NEEDS DOC: the Attorney-General’s enforcement report under the 2025 Supplementary Act, and the Federal Ministry of Justice’s response to FOI requests on ECOWAS Court judgment compliance].
Anene-Maidoh’s Dakar audit attributed the pattern to weak political commitment, inadequate domestic enforcement structures, and failure to fully respect treaty obligations, and noted the discernible pattern of non-compliance includes prolonged delays, selective enforcement and resistance to politically sensitive cases, particularly those involving elections, opposition politics, national security and substantial monetary compensation. Dasuki’s case sits squarely in that last category. So does Okolie’s. The ECOWAS Commission itself enforces 75 percent of judgments against it. Nigeria, the bloc’s biggest economy and the court’s host, enforces 16.6 percent.
Nigeria demanded, and received, a regional court with binding judgments. Its citizens took the promise seriously enough to walk through the court’s doors in Abuja, 125 times. Ten times, the state paid what the court ordered. Fifty times, it did not. The docket exists. The victims have names, suit numbers and naira figures. The bill is real, and it is growing, one ignored judgment at a time.
