A US travel ban imposed on all members of a Supreme Court panel over one of its judgments is still in force, retiring Justice Uwani Musa Abba-Aji said in Abuja on Friday.
Abba-Aji spoke at a valedictory court session held in her honour at the Supreme Court. “One of such challenging judgments was widely misinterpreted and led to a travel ban to the United States of America being imposed on all members of the panel, a ban which still holds today,” she said.
She did not name the judgment or say when the restriction was imposed. Vanguard reported that it understood the ban to be linked to the court’s January 2020 judgment that removed Emeka Ihedioha as Imo State governor and declared Hope Uzodimma the winner of the 2019 election. That seven-member panel included the current Chief Justice of Nigeria, Kudirat Kekere-Ekun.
Abba-Aji called the restriction part of the price of her service. “Such inconveniences were a small price to pay to preserve the chastity of justice,” she said.
She also recalled receiving a call in 2016, while on a programme in Washington DC, telling her to answer an EFCC petition in Lagos. She said she became “a regular visitor at the EFCC office in Lagos” over corruption allegations she knew nothing about, and was later cleared, Daily Trust reported.
Kekere-Ekun said Abba-Aji’s career was part of the story of how the place of women in the judiciary had evolved. Abba-Aji, who was born in Gashua, Yobe State, joined the judicial service in Borno State in 1973 and was appointed to the Supreme Court in January 2019.
She retires on Saturday, when she turns 70, the mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices.
Sources: Daily Trust; Vanguard; The ICIR
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