Contribution

The State of Free Online Access to Nigerian Public Legal Information

This paper aims to assess the current state of free access to the primary sources of Nigerian law on the World Wide Web, provided by the government and non-state actors. It presents a historical perspective of the publication of laws in Nigeria (one of Africa’s leading economies) and examines the adequacy of its legal framework for access to public legal information in this information and communications technology (ICT) age. The paper reveals that neither the Nigerian federal government nor any of its thirty-six States has any official online legal information database and that the prevalent practice by these governments is the publication of print legal information as a revenue-generating business. It further finds that non-state actors provide access to a majority of the available free online legal information resources, but they are grossly inadequate because they are neither up-to-date, comprehensive, nor accurate reproductions. The paper argues that the lack of political will to actualise the basic tenets of democracy (especially, transparency, the rule of law, and public participation in governance) is the preeminent factor responsible for the extremely poor state of public access to Nigerian public legal information. It concludes that the starting point towards the provision of adequate public access to the primary sources of Nigerian law is the abrogation of copyright in the texts of all government works, which include legal information, by amending section 4 of the Nigerian Copyright Act 1988 to reverse its copyright impediment to free and adequate access. This will introduce the necessary paradigm shift towards the realisation that governments hold public information in trust for the people who are its rightful owners and therefore have the right of free and adequate access to it. In addition, the enactment of appropriate legislation that clearly defines the duty of the federal, state, and local governments to develop and maintain comprehensive and up-to-date legal information online databases with free access is indispensable.

Related Session:

October 12th, 2018
Session V.A. Legal Knowledge Sharing
11:45-13:30
Aula Magna of the Rectorate of the University of Florence