Legal scholarship published on SSRN spanning constitutional law, international criminal law, and Security Council reform, drawing on my LLM research in international law, security, and diplomacy.
This article traces how section 419 of Nigeria's Criminal Code Act grew from an ordinary colonial-era fraud provision into a globally recognised shorthand for advance-fee fraud. It follows the offence from its origins in the 1916 Criminal Code, through the socio-economic conditions of the 1980s that gave rise to organised 419 schemes, to the internet era that multiplied its reach.
The piece then examines Nigeria's statutory response in detail: the original section 419 offence, the Advance Fee Fraud and Other Related Offences Acts of 1995 and 2006, and the institutional role of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. It reviews the leading Nigerian judicial decisions on the offence, situates the phenomenon within transnational organised crime and cybercrime instruments such as the Palermo and Budapest Conventions, and considers the practical barriers that mutual legal assistance and extradition face in cross-border enforcement.
It closes with reform proposals: stronger victim restitution mechanisms, faster international evidence-sharing, greater technical capacity within Nigerian courts and the EFCC for digital and cryptocurrency-linked fraud, and public education in the countries most targeted by these schemes.
Among the grounds urged against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's election in 2023 were three allegations bearing on section 137 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999: that a thirty-year-old United States civil forfeiture order disqualified him under section 137(1)(d); that he held citizenship of the Republic of Guinea in addition to Nigeria; and that a certificate he presented to the electoral commission was forged. This article traces how each allegation was actually argued and determined by the Presidential Election Petition Court, drawing a sharp procedural distinction the public discourse around the case largely missed: the forfeiture allegation, raised in the Allied Peoples Movement's petition, was fully pleaded, evidenced and decided on its merits, while the citizenship and forgery allegations, raised only in the companion Atiku Abubakar/Peoples Democratic Party petition, never reached the merits at all, struck out for having been improperly introduced through a Reply rather than the petition itself. The article closes by weighing, evenhandedly, the competing assessments of whether this outcome reflects principled constitutional textualism or an unduly narrow reading of section 137 that left serious allegations against a presidential candidate untested.
Universal jurisdiction – the principle that a state may investigate and prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture irrespective of where the offence was committed or the nationality of the perpetrator or victim – has, after decades of dormancy following the Pinochet litigation of the late 1990s, entered what commentators increasingly describe as a period of rebirth. This article assesses that rebirth empirically and doctrinally, documenting a marked rise in extraterritorial and universal-jurisdiction proceedings across Europe between 2023 and 2026, and situating these developments within the doctrinal architecture built by the Lotus case, the Eichmann trial, the Pinochet litigation, and the International Court of Justice's judgments in the Arrest Warrant and Habré cases. It identifies four structural limitations that qualify any triumphalist reading of this trend, and concludes that the 2023 Ljubljana–Hague Convention on mutual legal assistance, together with the ICC's positive-complementarity policy, offers the most realistic institutional pathway toward a more coherent, better-resourced and less geographically skewed global architecture of domestic accountability.
The veto power vested in the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the ‘P5’) by article 27(3) of the Charter of the United Nations was conceived in 1945 as the price of great-power participation in a collective security system. Eight decades later, that same instrument has repeatedly obstructed the Council's response to the gravest crimes known to international law. This article examines whether, and on what legal and normative basis, the P5 ought to voluntarily restrain their exercise of the veto in situations involving mass atrocity crimes, surveying the Charter architecture of the veto, the practical record of Council paralysis across seven case studies, and the principal voluntary restraint initiatives, including the Small Five proposal, the French-Mexican Political Declaration, and the General Assembly's 2022 ‘Veto Initiative’ resolution. It concludes that while a legally binding restriction on the veto remains foreclosed by the Charter's amendment procedure, a normatively persuasive and increasingly consolidated case exists for voluntary restraint.
Following the conviction of Bernard Antwi Boasiako, the Ashanti Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, popularly known as Chairman Wontumi, on charges under the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006, senior figures within his party publicly designated him a ‘political prisoner.’ This article tests that designation against the only codified intergovernmental definition of the term, Resolution 1900 (2012) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, against the analogous body of English jurisprudence on the meaning of a ‘political offence’ in extradition law, and against the Ghanaian constitutional framework governing due process and judicial independence. Applying these standards to the findings of fact actually recorded in the judgment convicting him, the article concludes that the conviction does not meet the legal threshold for political-prisoner status, notwithstanding that narrower and more defensible institutional criticisms of the trial court's reasoning, and of prosecutorial policy generally, remain properly open to debate.