The Excessive Courtroom of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) has accepted eight displays submitted by the Premiere Academy of Abuja as a part of its N500 million defamation lawsuit in opposition to Lemmy Ughegbe, a gender activist primarily based in Abuja.
Justice Kayode Agunloye, presiding over the case on the Kwali division of the court docket, admitted the displays throughout a session the place Barrister Chike Nwogho represented the Academy.
Premiere Academy, situated within the Lugbe space of Abuja, is searching for N500 million in damages, claiming that Ughegbe’s defamatory statements have harmed its status. The lawsuit, filed by Chief Adegboyega Awomolo (SAN), requests that the court docket prohibit Ughegbe from making additional defamatory remarks, notably relating to the alleged rape of a feminine scholar, Miss Keren-Happuch, who reportedly died on the college premises.
The Academy alleges that Ughegbe has repeatedly claimed that the 14-year-old scholar was raped, and a condom was left inside her, resulting in sepsis and subsequent issues that resulted in her loss of life from hyperglycemia on June 22, 2021.
Throughout proceedings, Nwogho introduced eight supplies to help the Academy’s case, together with a flash drive containing a video clip of Ughegbe addressing roughly 5,000 attorneys on the 2021 Regulation Week of the Nigerian Bar Affiliation (NBA) in Abuja, the place the alleged defamatory feedback had been made.
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Moreover, the Academy submitted three years’ value of admission registers, displaying a decline in scholar enrollment attributed to Ughegbe’s persistent allegations. In 2022, the registers indicated that solely 59 new candidates sat for the admission examination, reflecting a downward pattern over the previous three years.
Different displays included on-line information articles from Every day Unbiased and The Solar, printed on September 2, 2021, which Ughegbe allegedly used to disseminate defamatory claims concerning the Academy. The court docket additionally reviewed a letter from Awomolo SAN’s legislation agency warning Ughegbe in opposition to additional defamatory actions, alongside together with his response, submitted by his lawyer, Johnbull Adaghe.
In opposition to the admission of those paperwork, Ughegbe’s counsel raised a number of objections, arguing that some weren’t correctly front-loaded and had been absent from the witness assertion of the Academy’s Principal. Nonetheless, the plaintiff’s lawyer efficiently countered these objections by referencing particular paragraphs within the witness assertion that referred to the paperwork.
Justice Kayode Agunloye in the end overruled the objections and admitted the displays into proof.
The court docket has scheduled a session for March 18 to publicly current the video clip that includes Ughegbe’s allegedly defamatory remarks. The case has been adjourned for the cross-examination of witnesses by Ughegbe’s authorized counsel.
Ughegbe, who leads the Coalition of Gender-Primarily based Violence Responders (CGBVR), has expressed that he won’t be intimidated by what he described because the Academy’s makes an attempt to silence him by authorized means. He has submitted his assertion of protection, which he plans to current throughout his testimony.