The Court of Appeal has fixed Tuesday for hearing of a suit filed by former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, challenging the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) order that removed him from office in 2019.
Onnoghen is praying the appellate court to void and set aside the CCT judgment delivered against him on April 18, 2019, on various grounds.
Justice Onnoghen through his lead counsel, Adegboyega Awomolo, SAN, is asking the appellate court to quash his conviction primarily on ground of want of jurisdiction, bias and absence of fair hearing.
The CCT had in 2019 convicted Onnoghen in all the 6-count charges of breach of Code of Conduct for Public Officers brought against him by the federal government while in office as CJN .
In the lead judgment delivered by Chairman of the CCT, Danladi Umar, he had ordered the immediate removal of Onnoghen from office as the CJN.
The Tribunal had also stripped him of all offices earlier occupied among which were the Chairman of the National Judicial Council (NJC) and also the chairmanship of the Federal Judicial Service Commission.
The tribunal also ordered the forfeiture of his five bank accounts and the money in the accounts which Onnoghen did not declare in his asset declaration form submitted to the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, an agency of the Federal Government.
Although Onnoghen had been on suspension since January 25, 2019 and had resigned on April 4, the tribunal nonetheless ordered his removal from office as the Chief Justice of Nigeria and also as the chairman of both the National Judicial Council and the Federal Judicial Service Commission.
However, dissatisfied with the CCT decision, Onnoghen in 2019 approached the Court of Appeal with 16 grounds on why his conviction by the Tribunal should be quashed.
Among others, he maintained that the Danladi Umar-led CCT panel erred in law and occasioned a miscarriage of justice against him, when it failed to decline jurisdiction to entertain the six-count against him.
He contended that the CCT Chairman ought to have recused himself from presiding over his trial.
In his seven-point reliefs, Onnoghen, applied for an order setting aside his conviction as well as quashing the order for forfeiture of his assets and to discharge and acquit him of all the charges levelled against him.
Listing some of the particulars of error in the CCT’s verdict, Onnoghen argued that he was a judicial officer at the time the charges were filed against him on Jan. 11, 2019 and as such cannot be subjected to the jurisdiction of the lower tribunal.
Onnoghen therefore applied for an order setting aside his conviction and another one setting aside the order for forfeiture of his assets made by the Tribunal as well as to discharge and acquit him from the charges.
