26,000 Nigerian children enter custody yearly, most without lawyers — Minister

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The Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, has said that about 26,000 children enter custodial and remand facilities in Nigeria every year, with 74 per cent held in pre-trial detention and 68 per cent having no lawyer from their first contact with the justice system.

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Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim disclosed this in a keynote address on Tuesday at the 66th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

The conference, running from 21 to 28 August under the theme “Beyond Limits,” drew thousands of lawyers, judges and policymakers to the Yakubu Gowon Stadium for a week of professional and policy discussions. The minister’s address came during a plenary session on justice for children, where government officials and child-protection advocates examined how Nigeria can implement diversion policies for children in conflict with the law.

“I want this conference to adopt these numbers as its baseline,” Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim said. “About 26,000 children enter custodial and remand facilities every single year in Nigeria. Over 122,000 in five years. Nearly 74 per cent wait in pre-trial detention without a timely hearing opportunity, and some 68 per cent have no lawyer from the first contact.”

She said the three figures point to a single, connected failure. “The 68 per cent shows that the system breaks down before a child is even charged. The 74 per cent shows that remand has become the default response rather than the exception. And the 26,000 shows that diversion, as currently applied, is not working.”

Diversion as an alternative to prosecution

The plenary’s central question was how Nigeria can strengthen and enforce prosecutorial policies that steer children accused of offences away from formal criminal proceedings and toward rehabilitation and community-based measures. That framework is backed by the Child Rights Act and the 2024 Prosecution Guidelines, both of which favour alternatives to prosecution for less serious offences.

Ben Odoh, Ebonyi State’s attorney-general and commissioner for justice, who chairs the body of state attorneys-general, said the problem is no longer a lack of legal provisions but a failure to apply them. “The challenge we have is that while the law provides for statutory rights, converting and translating these rights into a live reality” remains difficult,” he said.

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He noted that prosecution should be a last resort in suitable non-serious cases. Section 209 of the Child Rights Act already provides five diversion measures: supervision, guidance, compensation, reintegration and reconciliation.

He added that if states adopt formal diversion policies, police, prosecutors handling children’s cases and prosecutors from the Ministry of Justice could work from a shared framework rather than acting independently.

Mr Odoh called on every state attorney-general to establish a prosecutorial policy on diversion. He also pledged to set up a specialised child prosecution unit in Ebonyi State, to work alongside the police unit responsible for prosecuting children.

‘Beyond laws on paper’

UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection, Natalie Macaulay, told the plenary that Nigeria needs to move past simply having laws on the books and start ensuring they change children’s lives. “We have to go beyond response to prevention. Beyond laws on paper to change lives instead. Beyond the courtrooms to the police stations, the communities and the places where the children first encounter the justice system,” she said.

Ms Macaulay called for diversion, rehabilitation and reintegration to replace detention as the default response for children in conflict with the law.

Minister demands early legal intervention

Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim said Nigeria already has the legal frameworks needed to protect children, but weak implementation continues to undercut them. “The honest question this conference must answer is not whether the law exists. It is why a child in many parts of this country still cannot feel its protection,” she said.

She said the justice chain most often breaks in the first 48 hours after a child’s arrest. Factors such as inadequate birth registration, exclusion from school, family breakdown, child marriage and weak social welfare systems, she said, push many children toward conflict with the law in the first place.

Only about half of Nigerian children under five have their births registered, the minister said, warning that uncertainty over a child’s age can expose minors to adult justice processes. She also described Nigeria’s current age of criminal responsibility, set at seven, as “indefensible in 2026” and called for it to be raised.

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Mrs Sulaiman-Ibrahim urged the NBA to roll out Duty Solicitor Schemes across its branches nationwide so that any child taken into custody can access a lawyer within 24 hours. “Our difficulty is not the absence of a statutory hook. It is the absence of a framework around it,” she said, referring to Section 209 of the Child Rights Act.

She also called for the establishment of substantive family courts, a legal presumption of minority in cases where a child’s age cannot be confirmed, mobile family and children’s Courts for underserved communities, and stronger training for lawyers, prosecutors and police officers who handle children’s cases.

“Only the Bar can put a lawyer beside a child in a police station tonight,” she said.

The minister proposed a formal Child Justice Compact between her ministry and the NBA, to be backed by joint monitoring and measurable indicators on legal representation, diversion rates and functional Family Court sittings.

“Those are limits we can pass, and we can begin this week,” she said.