The Chief Judge of Kano State, northwest Nigeria, has announced plans to elect courts to handle sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) cases in the state.
Justice Nura Sagir stated this during a dissemination meeting organised by the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption (ROLAC) programme with funding from the European Union.
Estimates published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) indicate that globally about one in three (30 percent) of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.
SDG Five: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Most of this violence is intimate partner violence. Worldwide, almost one-third (27 percent) of women aged 15 to 49, who have been in a relationship, report that they have been subjected to some form of physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner.
Recently, Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) expressed worry over statistics in Kano which indicate that gender-based violence is high in the state.
Justice Sagir said Kano is currently constraint to have designated courts because of the low number of judges in the state.
‘Some states have specialised courts for SGBV cases but at the moment we don’t have that in Kano because of the number of judges in the state’, he said.
‘We currently have 19 judges and have thousands of cases ranging from civil, criminal, fundamental and enforcement cases…
‘But recently, the NJC has given us permission to appoint about nine more judges in which the process has begun and we hope that once we get the additional judges we will be able to designate high courts to entertain SGBV cases.
‘What we do at the moment is take cases of rape to the women judges but that is not enough. We are also looking at situations where Chief Magistrates can trial rape cases as it is done in other states’.
He further hinted on plans to increase the number of small claims courts from five to 12 in the state to enable persons with small businesses access to the courts to get speedy trials.
Photo Source: UNICEF
