Things you must know before you approach any court to address your grievances

BY STANLEY ALIEKE

Before you go to court to seek redress for any action, there are several issues that you must consider or you risk losing the case or having your matter struck out by the court.

Sometimes people are so eager and excited to rush to court on every bit of grievances. People should know that the court is the last resort, i.e. when you have reasonably tried to settle the matter in other ways and it’s not working then you can approach the court. Going to court to seek redress should never be the first option rather than the last option for you.

Before you approach the court, there are prerequisites that you must have met or expected to meet, and the court is bound to look into whether you have done that or checked those boxes, if not your case may get struck out or you stand losing the case in court.

First, before you approach the court you are expected to ask yourself whether you have a “locus standi” in the extant matter. This means, the matter you are eager to approach the court for redress, does it personally concern you or do you have a personal interest in that matter. If the answer is in the negative, the court is bound to strike out your matter because the matter no matter how grievous your grievances may be does not directly concern you and you will be tagged as a meddlesome interloper or a busybody who just wants to waste the court’s valued time.

Next, before you approach any court for any matter, you should ask yourself which court is competent to hear the matter. This means that not all courts are competent or have the capacity to hear every matter. You should first consider which court has the jurisdiction to attend to the matter. Not all courts have jurisdiction over every matter. There’s territorial jurisdiction and then monetary jurisdiction. For example, The high court of any state has the territorial jurisdiction to hear any matter relating to land that is situated in that state. This is called “Lex Situs”.

If you take a matter that a magistrate court is not competent to attend to the magistrate court, the matter will be struck out on the ground of jurisdiction of the court. For example, in tenancy matters, when the tenancy sum is below N10 million, the magistrate court has jurisdiction but when the tenancy sum is above N10 million, it will be above the monetary jurisdiction of the magistrate court and you are expected to approach the high court in that instance.

Again, before you approach the court to address your grievances, you should also consider if the offence or the grievances you want to table before the court is an offence known to law. It is the law as provided in section 36(12) of the constitution that a person should never be punished for any offence that was not provided for in any law or act. This is to say that if your aggressor’s action has not been provided for in any law or punishable by any law then the offence or grievances you want to approach the court to seek redress for is not known to the law and you will just be a time-waster. An example of an offence not known to the law is adultery or fornication. You cannot sue your partner for cheating on you because the act of fornication or adultery was not made an offence or provided for as an offence in any Nigerian law or act.

More so, before you go to court to seek redress, you should also consider if your aggressor is someone who can be sued. There’s something called legal immunity and it is a shield that covers some class of persons and places a mark on them to make them “unsueable” by anybody. For example, you cannot sue a sitting president or a sitting governor for any act whatsoever for the time they are still serving in that capacity, so also you cannot sue another country’s representative or a diplomat, this is called diplomatic immunity.

Also, before you approach the court the court expects you to have tried to settle the matter amicably before coming to them and it is only when your approach for out-of-court settlement fails that you can approach the court. The court expects every aggrieved person to seek other alternative dispute resolution schemes (ADR) like negotiation, mediation, arbitration, etc. If you did not consider this option through a letter of demands or pre-action notices then your case may risk getting struck out.

The court docket is filled up with a lot of cases and the court gets very angry when a so-called aggrieved person wants to waste their time or add more to their job by bringing up an unnecessary and frivolous suit or bringing up a matter in the court where the court is not competent or lack the jurisdiction to attend to hence the reason why an aggrieved person must check all the boxes of the perquisites stated above before approaching the court of law for redress.

Alieke (Esq) is a lawyer based in Abuja. He can be reached via [email protected]