TheCable

The Presidency has threatened litigation against Nnamdi Nwokocha, a lawyer, over comments he made about the issue of President Muhammadu Buhari’s certificate during an interview.

Reacting to Nwokocha’s comments, , Garba Shehu, senior special assistant to the president on media and publicity, said it was unfair for a lawyer who is a litigant in a case pending in court to hijack the power of a judge by declaring the president guilty of what he is accused of on the pages of newspapers.

Shehu advised the lawyer to stop his “unfair and professionally inappropriate abuse of free speech”, if he does not want the presidency to apply the instrumentality of the law in dealing with his “unethical actions”.

“Newspaper pages are not alternative courts where a lawyer can declare anybody guilty of anything when the court has not formally given a definitive judgment on an issue before it,” he said.

“The two-pages interview splashed on pages 56-57 of the Saturday edition of June 11 breaches a lawyer’s ethical code and we hope that the court and the bar association will take notice of this.

“Any lawyer that sincerely believes in judicial process and the rights of other parties to a case would not have engaged in the inappropriate and unprofessional practice of trial by media, especially a situation where Nwokocha openly declared the President guilty when the court didn’t make that declaration.

“Free speech is not synonymous with recklessness and wanton abuse of the rights other parties to a case in court.

“The litigant’s unabashed claim that he was a card-carrying member of the opposition PDP which lost power in the last election clearly indicates a scheme that seeks power by circumventing the democratic process of elections.”

Shehu added that “gag orders emerged in the United States on account of lawyers’ inappropriate conduct on trying and convicting people on the pages of newspapers or the court of public opinion”.