Nigeria’s Judicial Council has suspended seven senior judges, who are being investigated for corruption.<\/p>\n
The judges are accused of taking bribes in exchange for favourable judgements – allegations they have denied.<\/p>\n
Security agents allegedly confiscated thousands of dollars when they raided the judges’ houses last month.<\/p>\n
President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to tackle corruption in the oil-rich nation during his election campaign last year.<\/p>\n
The judicial regulatory body of Nigeria, the National Judicial Council (NJC), said the judges should not perform judicial functions while on trial for alleged corruption.<\/p>\n
“Judicial officials who are being investigated for alleged high-profile criminal offences (must) not perform judicial functions until their cases are concluded,” said Chief Justice Mahmud Mohammed, who is the head of the council.<\/p>\n
A total of 15 judges are under investigation. Seven of them had been arrested last month by the Department of State Service (DSS) but have now been released on bail.<\/p>\n
Justice ministry sources say the judges will be charged in the coming days, the AFP news agency reports.<\/p>\n
The NJC, which aims to ensure the independence of the judiciary, has also set up a three-member transparency and anti-corruption committee to handle petitions and graft accusations against the judges.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nigeria’s Judicial Council has suspended seven senior judges, who are being investigated for corruption. The judges are accused of taking bribes in exchange for favourable judgements – allegations they have denied. Security agents allegedly confiscated thousands of dollars when they raided the judges’ houses last month. President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to tackle corruption in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":265579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[3,751],"class_list":["post-265576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","tag-ghana-news","tag-nigeria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=265576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/265579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=265576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=265576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=265576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}