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Supreme Court · 1983
What does the constitutional right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time require, and can it be waived?
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The question the court actually had to answer. Everything a judgment settles flows from this, and nothing beyond it does.
What does the constitutional right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time require, and can it be waived?
Proceedings had taken an extraordinary length of time to be concluded, and the delay was said to have deprived a party of a fair hearing.
The Supreme Court treated the right to a hearing within a reasonable time as an integral part of the right to a fair hearing, not an optional extra.
It considered how far a party can be taken to have given up such a right, and held that the fullest protection belongs to a party who has not knowingly and deliberately relinquished it.
Stated narrowly, as the case is genuinely cited for — not stretched into the broader proposition it is often summarised as.
A hearing that is not concluded within a reasonable time is not a fair hearing, and the right is not lightly treated as waived.
Our explanation of what the decision means for an ordinary reader. It is not the judgment.
Justice arriving eventually is not the same as justice. The Constitution's promise of a fair hearing includes a hearing that actually finishes within a reasonable time.
What counts as reasonable depends on the case — its complexity, what each side did, and what was at stake. Delay you caused yourself is a different thing from delay imposed on you.
The part most summaries leave out, and the part that most often causes a case to be cited for something it never decided.
Named generally. Read the official text of any instrument you intend to rely on.
This decision is reported in the Nigerian law reports. Locate it by its case name in a law report series or through the court's own record, and read the judgment before relying on it.
Subject area: Court & Legal Process