…Remand Has Become Default For Children In Nigeria
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The Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, has disclosed that approximately 26,000 children enter custodial and remand facilities across Nigeria annually, with 68 per cent having no access to a lawyer from their first contact with the justice system.
Sulaiman-Ibrahim said nearly 74 per cent of the affected children remain in pre-trial detention without a timely opportunity to appear before a court, while more than 122,000 children have passed through custodial facilities within the past five years.
The minister disclosed the figures during a keynote address at the 66th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
Speaking during a plenary session on justice for children, she urged the NBA and other justice-sector stakeholders to adopt the figures as a baseline for measuring reforms in the country’s child justice system.
“I want this conference to adopt these numbers as its baseline,” she said.
“About 26,000 children enter custodial and remand facilities every single year in Nigeria. Over 122,000 in five years. Nearly 74 per cent wait in pre-trial detention without a timely hearing opportunity, and some 68 per cent have no lawyer from the first contact.”
According to the minister, the figures reveal connected failures within Nigeria’s child justice system, beginning from the point of arrest and continuing through detention and prosecution.
“The 68 per cent shows that the system breaks down before a child is even charged. The 74 per cent shows that remand has become the default response rather than the exception. And the 26,000 shows that diversion, as currently applied, is not working,” she said.
Sulaiman-Ibrahim maintained that the most critical period for protecting a child in conflict with the law is within the first 48 hours after arrest, warning that the absence of early legal intervention frequently exposes children to prolonged and unnecessary detention.
She called on the NBA to establish and expand Duty Solicitor Schemes across its branches to ensure that every child taken into custody has access to legal representation within 24 hours.
“Only the Bar can put a lawyer beside a child in a police station tonight,” she said.
The minister noted that Section 209 of the Child Rights Act provides a statutory basis for diverting children away from formal criminal proceedings and towards rehabilitation, counselling and community-based measures, particularly in cases involving less serious offences.
She, however, argued that the existence of the law had not translated into adequate protection for children because the necessary implementation framework remained weak.
“Our difficulty is not the absence of a statutory hook. It is the absence of a framework around it,” she said.
She identified inadequate birth registration, school exclusion, family breakdown, child marriage and weak social-welfare systems as factors that could push children into conflict with the law.
According to her, only about half of Nigerian children below the age of five have their births registered. She warned that the inability to establish a child’s age could result in children being subjected to adult criminal processes and denied protections specifically provided for minors.
“The honest question this conference must answer is not whether the law exists. It is why a child in many parts of this country still cannot feel its protection,” the minister said.
Sulaiman-Ibrahim also called for Nigeria’s minimum age of criminal responsibility to be raised from seven years, describing the existing threshold as “indefensible in 2026.”
She urged prosecutors, police authorities, courts, legal-aid providers and social-welfare institutions to treat the detention of children as a measure of last resort and implement diversion policies that prioritise rehabilitation and reintegration.
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