Nnamdi Kanu: 8-day vacuum after Appeal Court acquital nullified trial – Global defence team

“This was no mere procedural hiccup; it was a total extinguishment of the prosecution’s claims, leaving no subsisting charge, no valid remand order, and no enforceable judicial process against Kanu anywhere in Nigeria.

“For the critical eight days from October 14 to 20, 2022, the prosecution filed its notice of appeal but secured no stay of execution. The judgment thus took immediate, self-executing effect, vaporizing the case file and crystallizing Kanu’s liberty as a matter of law.

“During this vacuum: No ‘pending’ proceeding existed to invoke the savings clause under Section 98(3) of the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022 (TPPA), which had already repealed the underpinning Terrorism (Prevention) Act, 2011 (as amended in 2013) on May 12, 2022.

“The 2011/2013 Act found no living application to ‘save,’ rendering any reliance on it thereafter a statutory nullity.

“Kanu’s continued physical detention by the Department of State Services (DSS) transitioned from lawful custody to outright contempt, as no extant order justified it. This interregnum was not a footnote but a death knell.

“As the Supreme Court admonished in FRN v. Ifegwu (2003) 15 NWLR (Pt. 842) 113, ‘once a criminal trial is void, nothing stands to be stayed’, a principle that exposes the prosecution’s later maneuvers as futile necromancy.

“The eight-day gap severed the jurisdictional chain irreparably; what followed was not revival but resurrection of a legal phantom.”

Faulting the stay of execution issued by the Justice Tsammani panel, which it described as “an ultra vires affront to criminal jurisprudence,” the consortium noted that discharges and acquittals in criminal matters take immediate effect and, as such, cannot be stayed.

“Compounding the vacuum’s lethality was the October 21, 2022, ex parte ‘stay of execution’ issued by a full panel of three justices of the Court of Appeal: Justice Haruna Tsammani (presiding), alongside two colleagues.

“This panel, invoking Order 7 Rule 5 of the Court of Appeal Rules 2021 and Section 24 of the Court of Appeal Act, provisions expressly tailored to civil judgments, presumed to suspend a criminal acquittal, arriving eight days too late to arrest what had already perished.

“Such a stay was jurisprudentially impossible from the outset. Nigerian law draws an ironclad line: discharges and acquittals in criminal matters take immediate effect, unstayable to preserve the sanctity of innocence.

“The Supreme Court has etched this in stone: In A.G. Federation v. Abubakar (2007) 10 NWLR (Pt. 1041) 1 at 44, it held that a valid order of discharge is ‘self-executing and takes effect forthwith,’ impervious to appellate suspension. In Onagoruwa v. State (1993) 7 NWLR (Pt. 303) 49, the apex court affirmed that ‘once a defendant is discharged, the presumption of innocence crystallizes immediately; no court may “stay” that right.’

“The Tsammani panel’s fiat was thus void ab initio—a civil-procedure chimera grafted onto a criminal acquittal, in violation of Section 36(5) CFRN and the bar against staying judgments of innocence. Its ex parte nature, devoid of adversarial input, further taints it as an abuse of process, emblematic of the panel’s apparent complicity in executive overreach.

“This was not judicial prudence but a corrupt sleight of hand, shielding the DSS’s contempt and propping up a politically motivated vendetta.”

The statement added: “The myth of judicial continuity: An appeal against nothing, salvaged by no savings clause.

The prosecution’s narrative, that filing an appeal ‘froze’ the discharge, crumbles under scrutiny, for a notice of appeal erects no automatic stay in criminal proceedings.

“It merely preserves the controversy for review; absent a lawful arrest, the judgment marches on unimpeded. From October 13, 2022, the acquittal hollowed the proceedings, rendering the prosecution’s ‘pending appeal’ a chase after shadows, an appeal against an eviscerated nullity that no elastic interpretation of the 2022 TPPA’s Section 98(3) can exhume.

“The panel’s invalid stay, even if timely, could not conjure continuity from contempt. The DSS’s refusal to release Kanu was not ‘faithful adherence’ to a stayed order but flagrant defiance, inviting the anarchy the Supreme Court decried in Governor of Lagos State v. Ojukwu (1986) 1 NWLR (Pt. 18) 621: ‘The rule of law presupposes obedience to the orders of courts; disobedience is an invitation to anarchy.’

“To launder such lawlessness into jurisdictional legitimacy is a grotesque paradox: ‘Because we refused to obey the law, the law continued to exist.’ No savings clause rewards such perfidy; it saves only what was pendente lite, not what executive hubris entombed.

“The Supreme Court’s remit: A procedural lifeline, not a statutory resurrection. The Supreme Court’s December 15, 2023, remit, setting aside the discharge and remanding for de novo trial on the seven counts, breathed procedural life into the husk of proceedings but wielded no power to reanimate the statutory grave of the 2011/2013 Act, repealed 19 months prior. The remit restored the trial’s form, not its repealed foundation; per Section 36(8) CFRN, it could not retrospectively validate a charge adrift in a statutory vacuum. What now limps before Justice James Omotosho in the Federal High Court, Abuja, is a ‘zombie proceeding’, devoid of legal sinew, animated by fiat, and ripe for quashing as the nullity it is.”

The consortium, in demanding Kanu’s immediate release, urged the United Nations, the African Union, and the International Criminal Court to investigate alleged judicial corruption and rendition crimes in the IPOB leader’s trial.

It stressed: “Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s ordeal is not isolated injustice but a canary in the coal mine of Nigeria’s eroding rule of law: a non-violent activist, renditioned abroad and tried in kangaroo courts, now ensnared by corrupt panels and executive contempt.

“The eight-day vacuum slew his prosecution; the Tsammani panel’s stay mocked it; and the 2022 repeal buried it beyond revival. KGDC demands: Immediate release: Enforce the presumption of innocence and quash this farce. International intervention: Urgent action from the UN, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and ICC to investigate judicial corruption and rendition crimes.”