The Commissioner for Justice and Attorney-General of the state, Mr. Wodu Kemasuode, who represented the governor at a brief ceremony to inaugurate a special session of the court in Yenagoa, said the state was ripe to have an Appeal Court’s division. A five-member panel of the court from the Port Harcourt Division, Rivers State, presided over by Justice A.A.B. Gumel, moved to Yenagoa for a two-week special sitting to hear over 200 appeals emanating from Bayelsa. While the Chief Judge of the state, Kate Abiri, led all the judges to attend the ceremony, the Chairman of the state’s chapter of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Mr. Eric Derie, led some practising lawyers to the event. Addressing the panel on the need to have a court of appeal in Yenagoa, Kemasuode said litigants and lawyers from Bayelsa were finding it extremely difficult to take their appeals to Port Harcourt. He narrated ugly experiences of riverine dwellers who travelled for many hours by boat to Yenagoa before heading for Port Harcourt to seek justice at the court. The commissioner said, “For people going to Port Harcourt for matter from the hinterlands of Bayelsa State, it takes a minimum of two to three days journey. Even for those going from Yenagoa, it takes two days if the litigants and lawyers must avoid going late to court. “It is, therefore, at great cost to the litigants in Bayelsa State in terms of money and effort for them to attend to matters in the Court of Appeal in Port Harcourt. “It is on this note that we respectfully call on the President of the Court of Appeal to establish a division of the Court of Appeal in Yenagoa to deal with the several hundreds of cases emanating from Bayelsa.”]]>