The Federal High Court in Abuja has ordered the police and its inspector-general Mohammed Adamu to release Mbarak Bala who was arrested in Kaduna on February 28, 2020, for alleged blasphemous Facebook posts about Islam.
Justice Inyang Ekwo delivered the judgment on Monday in a fundamental rights enforcement suit filed by Mr Bala.
The judge ruled that Bala’s detention in an unknown facility since February “because he expressed his option about religion on Facebook, constitutes an infraction of the applicant’s rights to personal liberty, fair hearing, freedom of thought, freedom of express and freedom of movement”.
The judge also declared that the action of the respondents (the IGP and the police) “in denying the applicant access to his lawyers constitutes a gross infringement of the applicant right to legal rep of his choice under section 34 and 35(2) of the 1999 Constitution”.
He, therefore, made an order “directing the respondents to release the applicant from detention to his lawyers on bail forthwith”.
The judge also made an award of “general/exemplary damages against the first and second respondents in the sum of N250,000 for the infraction of the fundamental rights of the applicant.”
