Attempts to Import Weapons

With the wind of economic globalization blowing across the planet, human rights are currently exposed to violations in great proportions by powers other than the State, including multinational corporations (MNCs). Unfortunately, many States - especially the developing countries, including Nigeria - hardly regulate the activities of the MNCs for various reasons, thus creating a regulatory vacuum. Under these conditions, the existing catalogue of civil, political, social, cultural, and economic rights of the people - as expressed in both domestic and international human rights law - are adversely affected by the activities of these MNCs. This book, developed from the author's doctoral/PhD thesis, critically examines: the various human rights violations and the environmental damage associated with oil exploration activities in the oil-producing communities of Nigeria; the international codes of conduct and norms; and the roles and responsibilities of the major MNCs in respect of these violations. Coming at a time when governments worldwide are striving hard to ensure corporate accountability for their activities in their host nations, this work is unique in that it incisively analyzes how the national and regional institutions could be strengthened to provide effective protection against human rights abuses and ensure corporate accountability. The book discusses in-depth how the human rights concept of environmental protection can be used by victims of environmental harm to promote and achieve environmental justice. The book will, therefore, be of great interest to academics, researchers, legal practitioners, courts, legislators and policymakers, NGOs, human rights activists, multinational corporations and their advisors, oil-rich nations, regional and international institutions, and students in law and other related disciplines. [Subject: International Law, Human Rights Law, Environmental Law, Energy Law, African Studies]

A claim and empirical demonstration that if human rights NGOs in Nigeria are to popularly legitimise themselves then almost all of them must undergo a fundamental revision of form, concept and activist methods. Legitimising NGOs in Africa will grant a greater achievement of influence to those organisations: this volume argues that only a transition to a mass movement model will ensure the legitimisation of most Nigerian and African human rights NGO communities. Okafor builds a list of recommendations designed to be used as a blueprint for successfully popularising NGOs.

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: 5.0, University of Lagos (Law), course: Environmental Law II, language: English, abstract: This paper sets out to consider all the alternatives for the enforcement of the environmental right, bringing into focus the various human right instruments both at the international and regional level. The constant degradation and pollution of the environment has stimulated both at the international and national level concerns as to its effect on the natural resources, wild life and human life. It has in fact been considered as the fourth generational right in the generational matrix due to the rising global issues of conversion of natural resources and safeguard of the environment. At the international scale, the United Nation in its sustainable development growth program has incorporated these environmental issues as part of its goals; climate action (Goal 13); life below water (Goal 14); life on land (Goal 15). At the regional and national level, environmental rights have been incorporated in the African charter and the 1999 constitution of Nigeria, respectively. The vagueness of these provisions have made its realization slim in view of the difficulty the court would be faced with interpreting such provisions in line with the prevalent situations in Nigeria. This paper seeks to look at the provisions of international, regional, and national human right instruments that guarantees the right to a clean and healthy environment and how they can be applied to enforce such right in Nigeria.

This book is a broad-ranging argument for thorough reforms at home and abroad in Nigeria as the only antidote to the nation-building dilemmas Nigeria confronts in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Because of its enormous material and human endowments, Nigeria is dubbed the “Giant of Africa.” It is a moniker many of its leaders take seriously. Yet, Nigeria is a state rife with instability, some of it periodically erupting into violence. Given still-ongoing national security challenges in the land that notoriously includes a bloody religion-oriented terrorism, the Fourth Republic since 1999, the longest period of continuous democratic rule since independence—key to the timeline of this book—has not been insulated from the spell of instability. The main argument of this work is that internationally agreed-upon ethical standards embedded in human rights can save Nigeria. This book is a methodologically and theoretically-grounded, seminal discourse on Nigerian foreign relations that spells out the human rights or lack thereof in those relations, including underlying and impinging domestic forces. This work is set around six issues of application embedded in a temple of Nigeria’s human rights foreign policy, comprising two steps and four pillars: reconstructed national interest, increased human rights at home, redesigned peacekeeping, reshaped foreign policy machinery, increased bilateralism in foreign relations, and the use of ECOWAS as human rights tool. Although focused on the period since independence, for proper understanding of events from the past that shape the current patterns of politics in the land, this book also embodies a historical background chapter that overviews the pre-colonial and colonial eras.

Nigerian women are undeniably Nigerians. The status bestow on them, rights and privileges enjoyed by other Nigerians. More so, statistics reveals that they constitute 69,086,302 of Nigeria's 140,431,790 population. This book examines the enforcement of women's rights as human rights in Nigeria. In doing this, it considers customs, constitution, laws, policies, courts' decisions as the court is the last hope of the common man and the place of obligations-imposing international and regional treaties ratified by Nigeria. Also it examines the difficulty of proper balancing of ideals like repressive customs versus societal standards, judicial activism versus Separation of Powers, inadequacy of laws versus non exhaustiveness of laws, international versus local laws supremacy.