Ex-minister of women affairs and social development Pauline Tallen has appealed the judgement of the Federal Capital Territory High Court which restrained her from holding any public office.
Tallen filed 13 grounds before the Court of Appeal in Abuja. The 22-page notice of appeal was filed on her behalf by the law firm of senior advocate Joe-Kyari Gadzama.
Tallen in the notice of appeal dated December 29, 2023, challenged the whole decision of Justice Peter Kekemeke delivered on December 18, 2023 in favour of the Incorporated Trustees of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).
The NBA, in December 2022, disagreed with Tallen, who was a minister in the Buhari administration at the time, for describing as “a kangaroo judgment that should be rejected by well-meaning Nigerians” the decision of the Federal High Court in Suit No. FHC/YL/12/2022 in Mallam Nuhu Ribadu vs All Progressives Congress (APC) & 2 Ors delivered on October 14, 2022.
In that judgment, the court declared that Tallen’s statement was unconstitutional, careless, reckless, disparaging, a call to disobey the judgment of the court, and therefore contemptuous.
Justice Kekemeke also granted among other reliefs an injunction restraining her from holding any public office in Nigeria, unless she purges herself of the conduct by publishing a personally signed apology letter to Nigerians and the Judiciary in two Newspapers.
The court ordered that the injunction restraining the defendant from holding any public office in Nigeria shall become perpetual if she fails to abide by the order directing her to publish an apology letter within 30 days.
But the former minister, in her appeal, said the trial court misdirected itself in law and occasioned a miscarriage of justice when it held contrary to a decision of a Supreme Court that a lawyer cannot depose to an affidavit in respect of a matter he participated in.
Amongst other grounds, the former minister also said that the trial judge wrongly relied on Section 1 (3) and/or Section 3(1) of the NBA Constitution in deciding that the association possessed the requisite locus standi to institute the action against her especially as it was not a party in the suit before the Federal High Court which judgment she referred to as a kangaroo judgment.
