He National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) on Friday hinted at its plan to appeal a court ruling nullifying its powers to fine broadcast stations for violating its broadcast codes.
He suggested that the ruling handed down by the Federal High Court in Abuja on Wednesday conflicted with a previous court decision. The agency did not provide details.
“The commission will appeal the ruling where it is found to be in conflict with the court’s previous ruling, which empowers the commission to regulate broadcasting in Nigeria,” the agency’s director general Balarabe Ilelah said in a statement on Friday. .
Suggesting that his agency had not yet received a copy of the judgment to be sure of its next course of action, Mr. Ilelah said that “global best practices and the ethics of the legal profession” precluded parties to a lawsuit from commenting. freely “on a sentence that he has not seen or read”.
It also did not say whether NBC would comply with the verdict for now.
The Abuja Federal High Court handed down the life injunction order in a judgment on Wednesday, revoking NBC’s powers to fine broadcast stations.
Judgment
The judge, James Omotosho, in a ruling, also struck down the N500,000 fines imposed on 1 March 2019 on each of the 45 broadcasting stations.
Mr. Omotosho maintained that NBC, not being a court of law, had no power to impose sanctions as punishment on broadcast stations.
He further argued that the NBC Code, which gives the commission the power to impose a penalty, conflicts with Section 6 of the Constitution, which gives judicial authority to courts of law.
Omotosho said the court would not sit idly by looking at a body that arbitrarily imposes fines without resorting to the law.
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He said that the commission did not comply with the law when he sat as a complainant and, at the same time, the court and the judge in his own matter.
The judge agreed that the Nigerian Broadcasting Code, being subsidiary legislation empowering an administrative body such as NBC to enforce its provisions, cannot confer judicial powers on the commission to impose criminal sanctions or penalties such as fines. .
He also agreed that the commission, not being the Nigerian police, had no power to conduct a criminal investigation leading to a criminal trial and the imposition of sanctions.
The ruling results from a lawsuit filed in 2021 by Media Rights Agenda, a nonprofit organization concerned with promoting press freedom and access to information.
The lawsuit is one of a series of legal actions NBC has faced in recent years to rein in the agency’s perceived arbitrariness and suppression of reports critical of the government.
Media Rights Agenda said in its lawsuit that NBC’s fines violated the right to a fair hearing under Section 36 of the Nigerian constitution and Article 7 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Ratification) Act. and Compliance).
Therefore, it requested a statement that the sanctions procedure applied by NBC in imposing fines of N500,000 on each of the 45 broadcast stations on March 1, 2019, violated the rules of natural justice.