The Obodo Centre for Advocacy and Equal Rights hereby invites applications from lawyers, law students, and legally-minded activists to participate in the Obodo Law Reform Lab (LRL) under the theme: Rethinking Rights in the Nigerian Constitution: The LGBTQ+ Question.

The Law Reform Lab is a months-long initiative dedicated to reimagining Nigerian human rights jurisprudence with a focus on LGBTQ+ rights.

About the Law Reform Lab

As Oliver Wendell Holmes posits, law is “the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious”. In Nigeria, these prophecies pronounce death and desolation upon the LGBTQ+ community, and from them, ominous reverberations fill the land. The landscape of legal scholarship on human rights and LGBTQ+ issues in Nigeria is sparse, with very few voices offering counter-prophecies to protect and defend the LGBTQ+ community. 

This lethargy is not something that the LGBTQ+ community can afford for much longer. The epistemological inertia surrounding LGBTQ+ issues within the Nigerian legal system is gradually entrenching and normalising homophobia as both sound legal principle and national culture. There is an urgent need for a mental jolt in the Nigerian legal discourse; a push to not only revive and reinvigorate the LGBTQ+ rights conversation but to rejuvenate the broader human rights discourse in the country. The courts must be encouraged to make new proclamations in the name of justice, but for that to happen, we must give them new divinations, new visions of what justice can be!

The Obodo Law Reform Lab is being convened in response to this jurisprudential lethargy. It seeks to challenge and reshape the legal and jurisprudential landscape in Nigeria through rigorous intellectual engagement. It will convene lawyers, law students, and legally-minded activists to critically examine Chapter IV of the 1999 Constitution, interrogate public morality and public policy as justifications for human rights limitations, and develop culturally conscious legal arguments for the decriminalisation of LGBTQ+ identities.

Participants will engage in:

• A physical retreat for critical dialogue and jurisprudential ideation.

• Conversations with experts and mentors on human rights and constitutional law

• Community dialogues and Symposia with the broader LGBTQ+ community

• The Production of well-researched essays offering culturally relevant and jurisprudentially grounded interpretations of the provisions of Chapter IV of the 1999 Constitution as they apply to LGBTQ+ issues in Nigeria.