Bar Discipline Must Not Be Weakened By Appeal Gap-Banwo
Mayor of Fadeyi and founder of Naija Lives Matter, Dr Ope Banwo has warned against any situation in which uncertainty over the appeal process weakens the ability of the legal profession to discipline members found to have breached professional standards.
Banwo said lawyers accused of misconduct must be given fair treatment and an opportunity to challenge disciplinary decisions, but argued that the process should not undermine the broader responsibility of the legal profession to maintain ethical standards.
He said professional discipline serves a purpose beyond punishing individual lawyers, noting that it also helps protect the public and preserve confidence in the administration of justice.
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According to him, the challenge facing the disciplinary framework should therefore be addressed in a way that protects both the rights of lawyers and the public interest.
“The LPDC does not exist merely to punish lawyers. It exists to protect the integrity of the profession, the administration of justice and, ultimately, the Nigerian public,” Banwo said.
He said a disciplinary system would lose its effectiveness if properly conducted proceedings could not result in meaningful sanctions simply because the framework for challenging such decisions was unclear.
Banwo stressed that the solution was not to deny lawyers access to review but to establish a system that allows disputed decisions to be examined without paralysing the disciplinary process.
He said the legal profession needed disciplinary institutions with sufficient authority to enforce its standards while ensuring that those institutions operate within clearly defined procedures.
The commentator also argued that the public had a legitimate interest in ensuring that professional misconduct, where established through proper proceedings, could attract appropriate consequences.
He said lawyers who represent members of the public occupy positions of trust and that the profession must therefore maintain mechanisms capable of addressing serious breaches of professional obligations.
At the same time, Banwo said any disciplinary framework must provide adequate safeguards for lawyers who believe they have been wrongly sanctioned.
“A mature legal system should comfortably accomplish both,” he said, referring to protecting lawyers from wrongful punishment while maintaining effective professional discipline.
Banwo called for reforms that would remove uncertainty from the disciplinary process and prevent gaps in the appeal structure from weakening the ability of the Bar to enforce professional standards.
He said the objective should be a system in which due process and professional accountability reinforce each other rather than operate in conflict.
