The Plateau State government has promised to evolve efficient mechanisms to fast track the justice reform agenda of the Federal Government in the state.
Gov. Caleb Mutfwang spoke in Abuja on Thursday at the 63rd Annual General Conference, (AGC) of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).
Mutfwang challenged legal practitioners on the necessity for them to steer the nation towards progress and development.
According to him, justice reform is a process and not an event that must be properly and steadily guarded to yield the desired results.
“The justice reform agenda is a continuous process, every refined nation on earth will keep fine tuning its justice process so that at the end of the day, everybody in society, no matter your position or standing, have a sense of access to justice.
“We need to reform the institutions, we need to reform the laws, we need to improve on the operating environment but more importantly, and we need to conscientise people to know that in this world, we need to be there for one another.
“Once we have that at the back of our minds, we will be conscious of doing justice wherever we find ourselves,” he said.
He said his administration had taken a decisive action by enacting the Law Reform Commission bill as its inaugural legislative act with the aim to facilitate fair access to justice across the state.
“For us on the Plateau, we are embarking on that process, we are looking at the institutions that dispense justice.
“We are looking at how to reform them, we are looking at the laws that clog access to justice that is why we have set up the Law Reform Commission.
“We will be ensuring that it carries out its activities very robustly and we are also in the process of setting up the gender equality commission to look at the issues about access to justice particularly for the female gender
“We are also looking at how to empower the Disability Commission so that it looks after the welfare and wellbeing of people with disabilities.
“We want to ensure that every person who is disadvantaged in society is given an opportunity to have access to justice, ” he said.
The President of the NBA, Mr Yakubu Maikyau, SAN, expressed gratitude to the governor for attending the conference and named him as the association’s ambassador at the Nigeria’s Governors Forum.
On his part, the Director Public Appeals in the Ministry of Justice, Mr Tanimu Ghazali, said that the ministry would continue to evolve ways to modernise the justice sector to increase access to justice.
Also speaking at the event, a former President of the International Federation of Females Lawyers, Mrs Rhoda Abel, said it was pertinent to ensure that laws were harmonised for efficiency.
According to her, discriminatory laws hinder women from accessing justice.
For his part, former Attorney-General of Ekiti, Mr Wale Fapohunda, SAN, said that it was essential to put pressure on stakeholders to put issues of justice reform on the front burner.
He said that if justice reform was gotten right, insecurity would be reduced to the barest minimum.
The theme for the 63rd AGC of the NBA is “Getting it Right: Charting the Course for Nigeria’s Nation Building.”