A lawsuit filed by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) against the federal government over the Twitter ban in the country, has been struck out by a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja on Thursday December 9.
The group in its lawsuit which has the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the Director-General of NBC, and the Minister of Information and Culture as 1st to 3rd defendants respectively, asked for an order of perpetual injunction restraining the Federal Government and the regulator from “censoring, regulating, licensing and controlling the social media operations and contents by broadcast stations and activities of social media service providers in Nigeria.”
SERAP which maintained that the court has an important role to play in the protection and preservation of the rule of law to ensure that persons and institutions operate within the defined ambit of constitutional and statutory limitations, also sought for an order setting aside the directive asking broadcast stations to stop using Twitter as it is “unconstitutional, unlawful, inconsistent and incompatible with the Nigerian Constitution of 1999 [as amended], and the country’s obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
According to the group, the directive amounted to a fundamental breach of the principle of legality, the rights to freedom of expression, access to information, and media freedom, and incompatible with the country’s international human rights obligations, among others.
However the defendants asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit as the plaintiff is not affected in anyway by the directive.
Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed’s lawyer, Nelson Orji who argued that the Federal Government operates within the ambit of the law and would not do anything to undermine it, added that the operation of Twitter, an American social media giant, within the Nigerian cyberspace required it to operate within the confines of the laws.
