23/09/2026
Justice for All: Reflections on legal awareness, community power, and what happens when people know their rights
The Liberian peace activist and Nobel laureate, Leymah Gbowee, is often found in her speeches echoing the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Peace is not just the absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice.” The words come from his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
For many people, justice is imagined as something distant. It exists in courtrooms, in legal books, in the language of lawyers and judges, in government buildings and policies ordinary people may never read. But in reality, justice also exists in smaller and quieter moments. It exists in whether a woman can stand as surety for her child. It exists in whether a person knows they cannot legally be arrested in place of another person. It exists in whether someone understands the difference between a civil dispute and a criminal offence. It exists in whether communities know what the law says before their rights are violated.
This understanding sits at the centre of the Justice for All project implemented by Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative.
The project, implemented with support from the European Union and International IDEA through the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption (RoLAC) Programme, began as a one-month intervention in 2024. Seeing the impact and the success recorded within that time, it was then expanded into a second phase across five local government areas in Kano State: Bichi, Dawakin Tofa, Rano, Ungogo and Wudil.
At first glance, the project may appear to simply be about awareness creation around the Kano State Administration of Criminal Justice Law (ACJL) 2019. But over time, what became clearer to us was that legal awareness is never simply about information. It is about power. It is about confidence. It is about whether people can recognise injustice when it happens to them. It is about whether communities can question practices they have normalised for years simply because they did not know alternatives existed.
Across communities, schools, correctional facilities and public spaces, we repeatedly encountered the same reality: many violations people experience are sustained in part by institutional weakness, but mostly by lack of access to legal knowledge. And once people begin to know the law, something begins to shift.
In April 2026, IWEI visited Government Girls Arabic Secondary School in Dawakin Tofa LGA, Kano State. Earlier in January, the team had conducted a sensitisation session in the school where students were introduced to some of the key provisions of the ACJL.
When we returned months later, the intention was to know what had stayed with them. What they had remembered and shared within their peers and communities? What had mattered enough to carry beyond the walls of the sensitisation?
One of the students we met was Ummahani*. She smiled when we asked if she still remembered the session. Then, counting on her fingers, she listed the provisions that she not only remembered, but had shared with her family and friends; Women can stand as sureties; No arrest in lieu; No arrest for civil wrongs; Everyone has a right to a lawyer.
What stood out was not simply that she remembered them. It was the specificity of what she remembered and why. When we asked her why those provisions mattered to her, she explained that in her community, she had seen people arrested in the absence of actual suspects. She had seen situations where women were denied the opportunity to stand as sureties because they were women. She had also seen disputes that were not criminal matters become police cases.
These were not abstract legal concepts to her. They were things she had witnessed around her. She also told us she had shared what she learned with her peers and people in her community. One of the hijabs distributed during the project carried a key message from the ACJL. Hers read: Women can stand as sureties.
Continue reading here: https://iwei-ng.org/justice-for-all-reflections-on-legal-awareness-community-power-and-what-happens-when-people-know-their-rights/
