December 11, 2014 – A judge of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN) Hon. Justice J.D Peters has said that the work of judges all over the federation is in danger.
“The work of judges is an endangered one”, he said.
The judge who was addressing a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN)who had raised issues relating to ethical behaviour and wrong usage of words outside legal registers and the need to correct affected lawyers in court said some of the reports he had perused in the bench submitted by some category of lawyers were even worse than what the lawyer was complaining about.
The learned judge, noted that he had in past made it a point of duty to correct errant lawyers and bring them in line with correct reality adding that such attempt has often landed judges with petitions.
“If you insists, you are landed with petitions”, he said, adding that when that happens the bench suffers since the time that would have been spent on addressing judicial matters would now be spent on replying to petitions.
This development he said could lead to a situation where judges will run away from handling some cases.
He alluded to situation where he had to advise a lawyer to embrace out-of-court settlement instead of wasting his time and money in litigation adding that the affected lawyers assaulted him by saying that the judge knows that he had a bad case hence he was advised to embrace settlement even when settlement is the vogue worldwide.
