Authored by Dr. Seun Solomon Bakare
Across Africa, law is often presented as a neutral institution. Courts interpret statutes, lawyers argue cases, and judges apply legal principles. For many marginalised people, however, law is not an abstract system. It determines whether they can live freely, organise safely, access healthcare, or seek justice without risking arrest, exposure, or violence. Laws inherited from colonial governments continue to criminalise identity, intimacy, association, poverty, and dissent. New restrictions are being introduced in the language of culture, morality, sovereignty, and family protection. Law is therefore more than a body of rules. It is a site where power is exercised, defended, and contested.
This approach asks difficult questions before a case is filed. What does the community want to achieve? Who will control the public account of the litigation? Can the claimant participate safely? What support will be available if the case attracts hostility? What happens after judgment? Most importantly, will the litigation leave the affected community stronger? These questions do not make legal action timid. They make it more honest, careful, and effective.
Africa already has a rich movement-lawyering tradition. Lawyers worked alongside independence movements, trade unions, women’s organisations, journalists, students, and communities resisting apartheid, military rule, censorship, and dispossession. They understood that the courtroom could defend an individual while also exposing the system responsible for the injustice. Today’s lawyers inherit that tradition. Our task is to adapt it to an age of coordinated anti-rights campaigns, digital surveillance, shrinking civic space, and renewed attempts to use criminal law against unpopular groups.
At the Justice Bridge Foundation, we are building the legal infrastructure needed for this work across West and Central Africa. Through the Bridge to Justice project, we are training and supporting lawyers in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Sierra Leone. They are learning to combine strategic litigation with criminal defence, constitutional advocacy, community partnership, and protection against retaliation. We want communities facing criminalisation to have trusted lawyers before a crisis occurs. We also want lawyers to understand that protecting clients requires attention to physical safety, digital security, mental well-being, and the political consequences of litigation.
Africa does not lack courageous communities or committed lawyers. What has too often been missing is a durable bridge between them. Building that bridge is the work before us. Courts will remain important, but the future of human rights will also depend on who selects the cases, whose voices shape the arguments, and whether every legal intervention strengthens the people most affected. The law has long been used to exclude and punish. Movement lawyering gives us a disciplined way to reclaim it as an instrument of collective freedom.
Dr. Seun Solomon Bakare is the Executive Director and Chief Movement Lawyer at Justice Bridge Foundation, where he leads a regional movement-lawyering effort dedicated to protecting key populations affected by criminalization across West and Central Africa.
Dr. Bakare has worked and/or represented clients before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the ECOWAS Court of Justice, and the ICC. Through his legal practice and research, he has contributed significantly to shaping regional and international jurisprudence.
