Nigeria’s Human Rights System

Human rights are arguably the intellectual patrimony of humankind. All societies and civilisations of the world had some idea of the inalienable rights prior to the formation of political systems. Even the social contract philosophers—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—all attest to this fact. In pre-colonial Africa, for instance, a system of human rights existed alongside institutionalised derogations such as discrimination, gender inequalities, etc. It is therefore a misunderstanding of history to deny the universality of the concept of human rights. As Baxi (2003: 12f) beautifully puts it:Granted the roots of inalienable rights may be traced to the ancient traditions of societies across the world, the practice of human rights is a recent phenomenon. This practice assumed the status of a global culture only after the gory events of World War II, and it gained access into Nigeria during the European expansion into the African continent. In this chapter, we try to situate the Nigerian human rights system within the global system of human rights by tracing its history. To achieve this objective, we draw information from a lot of available sources. But it is important to point out that there is no official history of human rights in Nigeria yet. Therefore, our account is tentative but largely reliable.