Dr Samson Osagie

By Jethro Ibileke 

The Edo State Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Dr Samson Osagie has disclosed that the state government has set up a committee to track all its court cases commissioned to private legal practitioners in the country.

He stated weekend during a chat with journalists in Benin.

He said the purpose was to enable it to understand the status and the nature of the cases and to ensure that the state was not embarrassed with court judgements in which it was not in a position to defend.

According to him, the committee which is headed by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Justice, Mrs O. Aigbavboa, will track both civil and criminal cases, especially those that are outside the state.

“The State Ministry of Justice has set up a committee to track all cases, both civil and criminal that were commissioned or given out to private legal practitioners. The purpose was for us to understand their status and the nature of those matters.

“The committee which is headed by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Justice, Mrs Aigbavboa, was necessitated by the recent experience of finding out that many cases involving the Edo State Government, particularly outside Edo State, in courts in Abuja and others, were being defended or prosecuted on the authority of the ministry and without the ministry now having feedbacks as to the progress or otherwise of those cases.

“The most disturbing aspect of it all is that you find cases that are listed particularly outside the state and even some within the Edo State, having the Edo State government as a defendant, without the state government being represented.

“An inquiry has shown that those cases were given out to private legal practitioners to defend and prosecute for the state.

“So, we are disturbed because we don’t want to see judgements being given against the state without us being in a position to defend them or all that.

“Ultimately, we want this committee to quickly track these cases, establish the lawyers to whom they were given, understand the cause and status of those cases, and require feedback from those lawyers as status reports so that the ministry will be able to track them.

“Those that are being diligently prosecuted by those lawyers we may still allow them but those that are not being prosecuted at all, and that have been abandoned, we will not like the government to be embarrassed by court judgements, we will retrieve them and reassign them to either state counsel or to other private legal practitioners,” he said.