Is An Arrest For An Offence You Are Innocent Of A Violation of Your Fundamental Rights?

Introduction

A lawyer went to inspect a property his client had just won in court, got "muddled up" and "squeezed" into a police van, and later sued for ₦50 million over what he said was a violation of his dignity and liberty. The Supreme Court agreed he'd genuinely been arrested and detained — and still dismissed his case entirely, because being briefly inconvenienced by police isn't automatically the same as having your constitutional rights violated.

Facts of the Case

A Port Harcourt court had earlier entered judgment for one Maria N. Warmate against Chisco Transport's affiliate, CTN Express Ltd., ordering recovery of the left wing of a property on Ikwerre Road. The judgment was executed, the property sealed, and the keys handed to Warmate's lawyer's chambers in January 2014.

Sometime later, the 1st appellant — a lawyer in that same chambers — went to the property with the 2nd appellant, a driver and mason, to carry out repairs. There they met the 3rd respondent (the companies' chief security officer) and the 4th respondent (the companies' own lawyer), who denied them access. According to the appellants, the 3rd and 4th respondents then got armed police officers already at the scene to arrest and detain them. The 1st appellant said he was "muddled up," had his phone seized, and was "squeezed" into a police vehicle for thirty minutes before being released once identified as a lawyer. The 2nd appellant said he was taken to the police station and held for four hours. Both said the experience left them psychologically traumatized.

The respondents told a very different story. They said the 1st and 2nd respondents did occupy two offices in that same wing that the earlier judgment had never touched, and that the appellants, together with several other people wielding hammers, entered the property without identifying themselves and began demolishing walls despite protests from staff. The 3rd respondent said he reported this to police out of concern for public order — and that the appellants had actually left the property by the time police arrived that first day. The next day, when the appellants returned to resume the demolition, police officers already on hand pursued and arrested them as they tried to flee. The respondents maintained the appellants were never truly "arrested" or "detained" in any way that mattered, and that people who provoke their own predicament aren't entitled to profit from it.

The trial court dismissed the appellants' claim, finding they'd failed to prove their fundamental rights had actually been violated. The Court of Appeal affirmed. The appellants pressed on to the Supreme Court.

Appellants' Case at the Supreme Court

The appellants argued the Court of Appeal was wrong to treat the 5th respondent's (the Police Commissioner's) blanket denial of any arrest as creating a genuine factual conflict requiring oral evidence — when the 1st to 4th respondents had themselves admitted, in their own counter-affidavit, that police had "caught" and detained the appellants. They argued the lower courts wrongly held they'd failed to prove their arrest was unlawful and instigated by the 1st to 4th respondents, and wrongly held they'd failed to rebut the presumption of regularity attaching to the police's own crime diary, interim report, and charge sheet. They also argued the Court of Appeal shouldn't have considered the 1st to 4th respondents' brief of argument at all, since it had been filed late, without the court's leave.

Respondents' Case at the Supreme Court

The respondents maintained that whatever inconvenience the appellants experienced fell squarely within lawful policing — a citizen's report of a suspected crime in progress, followed by an arrest carried out on reasonable suspicion and to prevent an ongoing offence, is precisely the kind of situation the Constitution itself carves out as an exception to the general guarantee of personal liberty. They argued nothing in the record showed torture, inhuman treatment, or any conduct beyond ordinary police procedure, and that a technical objection to the timing of a filed brief, raised only in passing and without any demonstrated prejudice, was no basis to unsettle two courts that had already ruled the same way.

Resolution of the Questions for Determination

On what actually counts as an "arrest," the Court explained that the term, at its core, is about someone's freedom of movement being taken away by force or restraint — being physically caught, held, or stopped from going where they please. Since the 1st to 4th respondents had themselves admitted, in their own affidavit, that police officers "caught" the appellants and put them into a waiting vehicle, that admission alone was enough to establish the arrest without needing anything further. On "detention," the Court took a similarly plain-language approach: someone counts as detained the moment their freedom to walk away is taken from them, and that's just as true standing in an open compound as it would be locked inside four walls. Being forced into a police vehicle and kept there until released on a lawyer's plea for thirty minutes met that description, however brief the episode turned out to be.

On whether the lower courts were right to demand oral evidence to resolve a supposed factual conflict, the Court sided with the appellants. The 5th respondent's denial came from a police deponent who wasn't present at the scene and was relaying only what he'd been told — a general, secondhand denial that couldn't genuinely contradict the direct, eyewitness admission already sitting in the 1st to 4th respondents' own affidavit. Since there was no real conflict once that admission was accounted for, the Court of Appeal was wrong to have required oral evidence just to establish something the respondents had already conceded.

On dignity and torture under section 34(1), the Court explained that dignity is about being treated as someone worthy of respect simply by being a human being, while torture is understood as deliberately inflicting real suffering — physical or mental — on someone as a way of forcing them into saying or doing something. Being "muddled up" (confused) and "squeezed" into a vehicle, however unpleasant, simply didn't rise to that level. An arrest carried out roughly isn't automatically torture, and the appellants offered nothing beyond those two phrases to suggest otherwise. The claim under this section failed for lack of evidence, independent of whether the arrest itself was lawful.

On personal liberty under section 35, the Court explained this guarantee protects everyone's freedom to move about without interference, subject to specific, narrow exceptions the Constitution itself lists — among them, arrest on reasonable suspicion of a crime, or action reasonably necessary to prevent one. Once the appellants proved they'd been arrested and detained, the burden shifted to the respondents to show the case fit one of those exceptions. Here, the unchallenged record showed a genuine complaint of property damage reported to police, followed by an arrest of people caught returning to continue the very conduct complained of — squarely within the exceptions, and squarely a lawful exercise of police power to prevent an ongoing offence.

On section 41 and freedom of movement, the Court held it simply had no application here — that provision concerns deportation, exclusion, or a citizen's right to move freely and reside throughout Nigeria generally, not a specific, localized arrest at one property. The appellants had never claimed anything resembling that kind of restriction.

On whether merely reporting a suspected crime exposes a citizen to liability, the Court held that this is exactly the kind of thing citizens are meant to do — flag suspected wrongdoing and let the police take it from there. What the police then choose to do with that report, using their own judgment and statutory powers, isn't something the original reporter answers for, unless there's actual proof they pushed the police toward one specific unlawful outcome rather than simply passing along a complaint. Nothing in this record showed that here.

On the late-filed brief at the Court of Appeal, the Court reaffirmed that court rules are tools for getting to a fair result, not a licence to win on a technicality. A slip that leaves the other side no worse off shouldn't decide a case. The appellants had every chance to answer the respondents' brief once it was filed, chose not to file a reply, and never showed the delay had actually hurt them in any concrete way. A bare objection raised on the day of hearing, with nothing more behind it, wasn't enough to disturb the proceedings.

Final Verdict

The Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the appeal. It found the appellants had indeed proved they were arrested and detained, and that the Court of Appeal was wrong to treat this as requiring further oral evidence — but ultimately upheld the dismissal of the underlying claim, since the arrest and detention fell within a lawful exception to the right to personal liberty, and no torture, inhuman treatment, or dignity violation had actually been established.

Key Takeaways

Proving you were arrested and detained is only the first step. The real question is whether that arrest and detention fell within one of the Constitution's own lawful exceptions — reasonable suspicion of a crime, or preventing one in progress being the most common.

An admission in a respondent's own affidavit can settle a factual point outright, even where another respondent files a general, secondhand denial. A denial without personal knowledge of the events doesn't create a genuine conflict requiring oral evidence.

Torture and dignity violations require real evidence of severe treatment — vague, informal descriptions like being "muddled up" or "squeezed" won't meet that bar on their own.

Reporting a suspected crime to police is a protected civic duty. The reporting party isn't automatically liable for how police then exercise their own discretion, absent evidence of active instigation toward a specific unlawful act.

A late-filed court process isn't automatically fatal. Where the other side had a genuine opportunity to respond and shows no real prejudice, courts will often look past the procedural lapse in the interest of substantial justice.

In Practice

Where a client's fundamental rights claim rests on an arrest or detention, it's worth assessing early whether the police conduct plausibly falls within one of the Constitution's own listed exceptions — reasonable suspicion of an offence, or prevention of one — since that question, not simply whether an arrest happened, is usually what actually decides the case. It's equally worth pressure-testing what "torture" or "dignity" evidence a client can genuinely point to beyond describing their own subjective discomfort; without more, that alone is unlikely to survive scrutiny.

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