AN APPRAISAL OF LEGAL PLURARISM IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN NIGERIA

📄 Project Abstract

It is trite beyound any equivocation that the Nigerian society is made up of people with diverse cultures, behaviours and ways of life. When the British came as colonial masters, they understood this and before they departed in October 1960, they devised ways of accommodating the inherent differences in the cultures of the North and South by ultimately creating two distinct Criminal Justice Systems, the Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes System for the North and the Criminal Code/Criminal Procedure Act System for the South. This was based on the premise that there was the need to respect the peoples diverse cultures, religions and ways of life. When the Country returned to civilian rule in 1999, some States decided to re-introduce the Islamic Criminal Justice System by enacting the Sharia Penal Codes and the Sharia Criminal Procedure Codes. Consequently, Nigeria became a federation with plural criminal justice systems. Although the three different systems of criminal justice administra...