“It was just like being on a date with a girl,” one of the judges told me, referring to the time he met his future wife, a Nigerian.
“She was just beautiful.
She looked just like me.”
In a country where more than 100 million people have been forcibly removed from their homes since independence in 1960, the idea of being a judge has been the preserve of a tiny minority.
There are just under 6,000 active judges in Nigeria, according to the country’s National Election Commission, and judges are not allowed to run for office, but are allowed to sit on committees, to be the legal adviser to politicians and to serve on other boards.
They are also allowed to teach at colleges and universities.
Judges in Nigeria are not legally required to wear a uniform, but some judges do, which means they have the potential to dress in a way that could offend.
“You know, if you dress in the way you like, you will get fined,” one judge told me.
“I had to get fined in the court.”
As a result, many judges are allowed only to wear white shirts, khakis and jeans, and they have limited authority to act in cases of social distancing.
And even those who do wear the uniform often don’t seem to have any authority over the people they oversee.
As the Nigerian courts work through the process of reopening to the public, I had the chance to talk with one of them about the judicial system.
Daca judges in the UK, the US and Australia have also been accused of engaging in abuse and sexual harassment against judges, but it is unclear whether this is the case here.
The UK’s High Court recently ruled that judges should not be allowed to beat or physically abuse a female judge, but a judge who was found guilty of this last year in the United States had been sentenced to probation.
The judge was sentenced to a six-month suspension from all court duties and ordered to undergo psychological counseling.
A judge in Australia was found to have physically abused a female colleague in 2011.
The court also found that a judge had verbally abused a witness during a trial in 2011, and a judge was accused of physically attacking a witness at a hearing in 2015.
A senior judge in the Philippines was also found to be sexually abusing his wife during the divorce process.
In the US, a judge in Arizona was charged with sexual abuse of a child in the 1980s and accused of abusing children during the process.
In both the UK and the US there is a strong tradition of women judges who have been convicted of serious crimes, including sexual abuse, assault, child endangerment and other charges.
“The judge in charge of the UK’s Daca courts has been found guilty and sentenced to prison for crimes such as kidnapping and aggravated rape,” a BBC report said.
“A judge accused of sexual assault in Canada was jailed for life for raping a female police officer in 2014.”
The US is also known for its judges who are accused of inappropriate behavior.
In 2014, an ex-girlfriend of one of US Supreme Court justices was accused by a woman who worked in his court of sexually harassing her.
“This woman, who is in her late 20s, said she had been told by her boss to not work in the courtroom and to stay home with her boyfriend because of his sexual habits,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
In 2015, the former head of the New York City District Attorney’s office was accused in court of having sexual relationships with three women, which led to an investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office.
A judge at the United Kingdom’s High Courts, a public prosecutor, was found in 2015 to have had a sexual relationship with one woman, which was later discovered to have taken place over a decade earlier.
“It was an open secret that the prosecutor in question had a personal relationship with her colleagues, and that was reported to her superiors,” the New Yorker reported.
In the UK the High Court is also facing an investigation after one of its judges, a man, was arrested for allegedly abusing his female colleague, the Times reported.
“It is not unusual for judges to be accused of misconduct or abuse by colleagues, even in their personal lives, and for a judge to be suspended or expelled for such behavior,” the paper wrote.
The US Justice Department’s inspector general has launched an investigation into allegations of inappropriate conduct at the US Supreme Courts, the New England Journal of Medicine reported.
In a letter to the New Hampshire attorney general, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice noted that the US courts had been cited for misconduct by a judge, a prosecutor, a deputy prosecutor and a public defender.
“As a consequence, the Supreme Court, the United Nations, and other international organizations are concerned about the well-being of the people and institutions they represent,” the letter said.
A spokesperson for the US Attorney General, meanwhile
