The Centre for Citizens with Disabilities, CCD, has organised a one day sensitization seminar for Justice Service Providers in Lagos.
The Head of Office of the CCD, Mrs. Florence Chinma said that the sensitization seminar was a follow up to separate courtesy visits to the various key stakeholders in the Justice system in the last one year.
This she said was necessary following alleged frustration that People with Disabilities, PWDs, experience when trying to access Justice.
She said that despite the fact that there is a National Disability Act, PWDs still find it difficult to access Justice as some of the court rooms, police stations and Correctional Centers still do not have ramps for use by people on wheel chairs, sign language interpreters for deaf and functional lifts, thus making it difficult for PWDs to even go and lodge complaints which is the first step in accessing Justice.
In a paper entitled “Understanding Disability Rights and Model, Miss Christiana Njoku defined disability as a long term impairment which makes PWDs unable to participate in national development on an equal basis with others.
Miss Njoku said that each cluster of disabilities face different barriers hence what constitutes non-access to a person on wheel chair is different from the person using clutches.
She said that about one point three billion people worldwide are physically challenged while in Nigeria the World Bank estimates of 2018 put the figure at twenty-nine million. By the end of 2023, the number would have risen to over thirty million considering the number of road crashes, communal crises, farmer/herders clashes among other factors.
According to Miss Njoku, several models such as moral and religious, medical, charity, and social have been used in the past to address disability matters and advised that the Human Rights model is the ideal one to apply.
In another presentation, Barrister Maria Kazeem said that the challenge of the inability to access Justice can be corrected by advocacy, assessable courtrooms, strengthening the capacity of key actors in the Justice system and building an all inclusive society.
Barrister Kazeem urged the Nigerian Bar Association to take up the issue of non accessibility of the courtrooms to PWDs with the relevant authorities to resolve it permanently.
The Justice Service Providers who attended the seminar include representatives from the Ministry of Justice, the National Human Rights Commission, the Police, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps and the Nigerian Correctional Service.
Other stakeholders at the seminar are the media, Civil Society Organisations and the different clusters of People with Disabilities.
