Danbaba Petitions Against Shariah Judge in Sokoto

Hassan Ahmed Danbaba has petitioned the Grand Khadi of Sokoto State against a Judge of Upper Shariah Court 1 Sokoto for alleged violation of his oath of office by acting in a biased and prejudicial manner against him.

The Solicitors in their petition dated March 24, 2017, said their client was wrongfully served in respect of criminal charge between Inuwa Abdulkapir V Hassan Ahmed Danbaba in case No CR/134/17.

The petitioner said, “We are Solicitors to Hassan Ahmed Danbaba the accused person in the above charge and we have his instructions to Petition your good office with regards to the above judge having violated his oath of office by acting in a biased and prejudicial manner against our Client.

“Sir, our Client was wrongfully served a criminal summons through proxy to appear before the above court to answer to some allegations leveled against him by the Complainant. He was served and given two days to appear before the court.

“Upon the receipt of the said summons, we filed a Notice of Preliminary Objection challenging the proprietary of the summons as a gross violation of section 36(6)(b) of the 1999 CFRN as amended which provides that every person who is charged with a criminal offence shall be entitled to adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence and that since the accused was not even served personally, the court had no jurisdiction to entertain the matter and that the court should in that circumstances strike out the case.

“Sir, we were in court on the 16th day of March 2017 to argue our Preliminary Objection having filed and served the Complainant .On that day, neither the Complainant nor his Solicitor was in court and the Senior Judge who came in at 10.am told us that his colleague that will preside over our case sent words to him that he will not be sitting and as such we should take a date. Upon telling the court that we came in from outside jurisdiction, one of the registrars of the court was called upon to give us date and we took 30th of March 2017 as the next adjourned date. This is in the records of the Court.”

They said “Upon our Client's instructions, we filed a Notice of Appeal in the Criminal Appeal Section of the High Court of Justice Sokoto to further challenge certain act of gross irregularities of the lower court and we joined the court as 2nd Respondent, and all the Respondents were subsequently served.

“On the 22nd of March 2017, we further filed a Stay of Proceedings in the lower court pending appeal which was also served on all parties and the return date for the arguments on all pending applications was the 30th day of March 2017, but to our greatest surprise, we were told by a colleague that the case was retrospectively backdated from the return date of 30th March to 24th March 2017 without any service on us or our client. It would interest you sir, that we have an address for service in Sokoto which is engrained on all our processes before the court.”