SECTOR 1 1.4 Government honours regional and international instruments on freedom of expression and freedom of the media Nigerian authorities have signed and ratified almost all international instruments dealing with freedom of expression and of the media. Among them are the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the Declaration of Principles of Freedom of Expression in Africa. The country is also a party to more than a dozen UN human rights conventions.4 Some of these instruments have been domesticated and the principles they uphold integrated into certain media laws. According to panellists, the Nigerian authorities have adopted a half-hearted approach to honouring international conventions and instruments. While current laws have permitted a diverse media landscape to emerge, media regulation is still not independent. Criminal defamation, which is universally considered unacceptable, is still in force. At the same time, state-media (federal and state government-owned media) have not been transformed into public media in the spirit of the Principles of Freedom of Expression in Africa. Commenting on the national situation, one panellist said: In as much as we are signatories to these instruments, honouring them remains a challenge because [the authorities] still want to control the media. Honouring [international instruments] requires going beyond ratification to implementation, otherwise, it is only a partial commitment. State governments have been even more reluctant in integrating universal principle in state laws. Domestication is only one problem. Panellists said citizens have not sufficiently claimed rights contained within international instruments through the courts. ‘Without that, there is no way of telling if they are honoured or not,’ said one panellist. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. In 2015, a lawyer sued the federal government for censoring the media by imposing a 24-hour notice of live political broadcasts. The court, applying the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ruled that the government-directives, issued through the NBC were illegal. In March 2019, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, a human rights non-profit organisation, dragged the Nigerian government to the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice over ‘the frequent and repressive application of the Cybercrime Act to harass, intimidate, arbitrarily arrest, detain and unfairly prosecute anyone found publishing views or facts perceived to be critical of the government at the federal and state levels and government officials’. A ruling is still pending. 4 See list of UN Human rights convention signed and ratified by Nigeria. Available online at: https://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/ UPR/Documents/Session4/NG/NHRC_NGA_UPR_S4_2009anx_RatifiedHumanRightsInstruments.pdf. 12 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER NIGERIA 2019