Appeal Court hears suit against ex-CJN Onnoghen’s removal Tuesday

The Court of Appeal will on Tuesday, August 20, 2024, hear a suit filed by former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, challenging the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) order that removed him from office in 2019.

The suit was filed at the Court of Appeal in 2019.

Onnoghen is praying the court to void and set aside the CCT judgement delivered against him on various grounds on April 18, 2019.

In his appeal marked CA/ABJ/375 & 376 & 377/2019, Justice Onnoghen through his lead counsel, Adegboyega Awomolo (SAN), is asking the appellate court to quash his conviction primarily on ground of want of jurisdiction, bias and absence of fair hearing.

Justice Onnoghen is the appellant, while the Federal Republic of Nigeria is the sole respondent.

The CCT had in 2019 convicted Onnoghen in all the six-count charges of breach of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers brought against him by the federal government while in office as CJN.

The CCT Chairman, Danladi Umar, in his judgement, ordered the immediate removal of Onnoghen from office as the CJN.

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The tribunal also stripped him of all offices earlier occupied among which were the Chairman of the National Judicial Council (NJC) and also the chairman of the Federal Judicial Service Commission.

The tribunal also ordered the forfeiture of his five bank accounts and the money in the accounts which Justice Onnoghen did not declare in his asset declaration form submitted to the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB), an agency of the federal government.

Although Onnoghen had been on suspension since January 25, 2019, and resigned on April 4, the tribunal nonetheless ordered his removal from office as the CJN and also as the chairman of both the National Judicial Council and the Federal Judicial Service Commission.

However, dissatisfied with the CCT decision, Justice Onnoghen in 2019 approached the Court of Appeal with 16 grounds on why his conviction by the tribunal should be quashed.

Among others, he maintained that the Danladi Umar-led CCT panel erred in law and occasioned a miscarriage of justice against him when it failed to decline jurisdiction to entertain the six-count against him.

He added that the CCT chairman ought to have recused himself from presiding over his trial.

In his seven-point reliefs, Justice Onnoghen applied for an order setting aside his conviction, quashing the order for forfeiture of his assets, and discharging and acquiting him of all the charges levelled against him.

Listing some of the particulars of error in the CCT’s verdict, Onnoghen argued that he was a judicial officer at the time the charges were filed against him on January 11, 2019, and as such cannot be subjected to the jurisdiction of the lower tribunal.

The Star