Community Legal Clinics as Vehicles for Promoting Human Rights and Access to Justice in the Niger Delta: Prospects and Foreseeable Challenges

Human rights will amount to sweet nothings if violations of human rights cannot be redressed. The duty of ensuring that human rights actually transform lives and not just remain as a rhetoric, or an exercise in futility, lies with all citizens especially lawyers (including law students) and the courts. It follows that access to justice, including legal justice, is an imperative to the realization of human rights. Actualization of redress for human rights is impossible without a mechanism for enforcement usually commenced by an action in court. Citizens must be aware that they have rights which the state is obliged to respect, protect and fulfil and also have the means, both financial and otherwise, to seek redress and be accorded with a fair hearing in the courts of law. Human rights and justice mean nothing to a man who is too poor to afford a lawyer or to afford the costs of filing processes. However, the fate of such a person can be changed by community legal clinics. This article therefore seeks to explore the prospects of utilizing community legal clinics as a vehicle for promoting access to justice and identifying possible challenges. It also makes recommendations to deal with the same.