Qualifications:LL.B (Ebonyi State University Nigeria), B.L (Nigerian Law School Lagos), LL.M in Public International Law (Bournemouth University), PhD in Law (Bournemouth University), Fellow (UK Higher Education Academy)
I am a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol Law School and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. Before joining UWE in September 2022, I taught law at UG & PG levels at Bournemouth University. I hold a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) Degree with 'First Class Honours' from Ebonyi State University Nigeria (2013) and a Master of Laws (LL.M) Degree with 'Distinction' in Public International Law from Bournemouth University UK (2017). In May 2021, I gained a PhD in Law from Bournemouth University. Earlier in 2015, I obtained my Barrister at Laws (B.L) Honours Degree from the Nigerian Law School Lagos and was consequently enrolled as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in October 2015. In September 2016, I joined Bournemouth University for my postgraduate studies. Before then, I worked with Kola Sodiya & Co, a firm of legal practitioners and consultants in Lagos Nigeria. Working with this law firm as an attorney, I acquired considerable experience in litigation (civil and criminal) and represented numerous individual/corporate clients in superior courts of records across Nigeria.
I am a recipient of many prestigious academic and scholarship awards. Among them: Attorney General of Ebonyi State award for 'best graduating student' in constitutional law, Ebonyi State University (2015); Fully Funded Abakaliki Local government Area Ebonyi State Nigeria Undergraduate Scholarship award for academic excellence (2009-2013); the highly prestigious Fully Funded British Government Commonwealth Shared Scholarship award for Master’s study tenable at Bournemouth University UK (2016-2017); and a highly competitive Fully Funded Open Call PhD Studentship for my winning PhD research proposal on the subject of 'Missing Migrants' in International Law (selected out of 90 applicants) awarded by Bournemouth University (2017-2021). In February 2022, I received the UK Global Talent Recognition as an 'Emerging Global Leader in the Field of Law' following a successful endorsement by the British Academy.
Area of expertise
My research expertise/interests span the different fields of Public International Law from general principles of international law and institutions to specific doctrines/principles of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and international criminal justice, transitional justice, transnational law as well as international migration and refugee law. Specifically, in the field of ICL, my research explores how the domestic implementation of the complementarity principle of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court within the African national legal orders and the African Union can end impunity for international crimes in Africa. In May 2020, my research (with S-D Bachmann) in this ICL field published in the Brooklyn Journal of International Law was cited twice before the ICC in The Hague in regard to the Situation in Central African Republic II (The Prosecutor v Alfred Yekatom and Patrice-Edouard Ngaissona). In the field of international migration and refugee law, my research building on my PhD thesis analyses the legal, policy and psychosocial dimensions of missing migrants in the context of the Europe migrant crisis.
In the area of international human rights law and global security, I am currently exploring new research themes around the interface between international human rights law and state counterterrorism measures and how certain state-invented counterterrorism doctrines attempt to limit the applicability of international law rules/norms to such measures. I am also currently researching the international history of modern human rights in an African jurisdictional context and its interconnections with the development of human rights and constitutionalism in Great Britain. I seek to understand how the universalist claims of western positive law that it has replaced the erstwhile pre-human legal order in primitive societies now sit tight at the heart of modern discourses on the international history of human rights in the world. My research feeds into the deeper philosophical thoughts that attempt to connect the emerging forms of international legal enforcement to a historical or philosophical foundation from where the widely professed emancipatory and redemptive power of human rights is said to derive its validity and origin.
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