From 1 to 3 November 2018, the International Nuremberg Principles Academy and the Wayamo Foundation organized two events in Lagos, Nigeria. Both institutions have previously conducted capacity building programs for Nigerian civil and military investigators and prosecutors since December 2016.
The workshop “Strengthening Justice and Accountability in Nigeria” was the sixth in the series and has been created to provide specific training to investigators and prosecutors, both military and civil, dealing with the most serious crimes in the country. This specific event was a three-day program with a curriculum that includes fundamental elements of international criminal law (ICL), international humanitarian law (IHL), preliminary examinations of the International Criminal Court, investigating and prosecuting sexual violence, and other concepts related to the field.
For the second workshop, entitled “Train-the-Trainer program”, four professors of the Nigerian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies and one from the National Judicial Institute were invited to take part in the first two days of the capacity building workshop when the academic and theoretical aspects of ICL and IHL were covered. The selected trainers benefited from the wealth of expertise provided by international experts and they will now be better equipped to pass on this knowledge to their students and the future lawyers of Nigeria.
The main objective of these events were to offer to practitioners of the judicial system and law professors, regardless the role they could play in the Nigerian society, the necessary expertise and knowledge to address the issues arising from the most serious crimes - international, transnational and terrorism-related.