 The moderators Dr. Ruben Apati and Mrs. Shola Sheredi and of course our host and the publisher of Gavel International, Mr. Mustafa Adekunle of Mushaki. Honour guests, ladies and gentlemen. First let me thank my dear brother Mustafa of Mushaki, CEO of Gavel International for the kind invitation to participate in this important conversation on the questions around reporting of virtual court proceedings. Reporting of court proceedings is a crucial exercise of the right to fair hearing, a cornerstone of which is that hearings must be held in public. How that right will be given full expression when court proceedings are within the encrypted confines of virtual platforms is really the subject of our conversation today. How do we give full expression to the right to public hearing when court proceedings are within the virtual environment? The attorneys general of Lagos and Iquiti states I believe deserve our commendation for bringing the matter before the supreme court. They asked the court to determine whether having regard to the constitutional requirement that court proceedings except for some exceptions must be held in public. Court hearings by the use of technology by remote hearings of any kind whether Zoom or WhatsApp or Skype or Microsoft teams or any other audio visual or video conferencing platform. Whether any of these virtual platforms hearing a case by these virtual platforms can in any event be constitutional. The supreme court, while dismissing the suits themselves as premature and speculated, nevertheless said that as things stood today, virtual court proceedings are constitutional. This wise approach of the court probably saved our system of justice another catastrophic round of technical decisions around the constitutionality of virtual proceedings. It may also be cautiously taken as a signal that the court expects our courts, the lower courts to go down this new path with as little attention to technicality as possible. So we are at a point where at least we know that virtual hearings are legal. This means that the court and this is the supreme court is satisfied that appropriate means can be found to ensure that hearings are public and that the press and indeed members of the public can access the proceedings. Now the technical issues around this is straightforward enough. And I'm talking about the technical issues around accessing the virtual platforms. I think that they are fairly straightforward. If for example we take the Zoom platform which we are using now, if this is the preferred option, the host who may be the registrar of the court will simply invite the press by making available the relevant coordinates of the meeting to enable the press. And of course when we say press now of course we are not talking about necessarily just the print media but we'll come to that in a moment. Would we just enable the press of members of the public to log on to the proceedings? Just as a physical court can only sit a determined number of persons. So the virtual court depending on the platform being used will probably have a stated number of persons who can access the proceedings. Practice directions may have to indicate how and in what order invitations will be issued especially to the public. News reporting today is of course no longer the preserve of traditional media. Every blogging, every blogger, micro blogger and other social networking services are now entitled to describe themselves as the press. And ideas say that they have the same constitutional protections as the traditional media would have given that our definition of freedom of expression does not restrict this in any event to the press as we understand that word or that expression. But this also means that all of the bloggers and micro bloggers and all people on Twitter and all the users of social networking services are also subject to the same restrictions and liable to the same sanctions as the traditional media if they violate the laws respecting issues of confidentiality, avoidance of prejudging cases, scandalizing witnesses, jeopardizing fair trials by media trials and all of the various violations that are possible. I think we are in an interesting place because in the past it was always the traditional media that could be accused of violations or could be sanctioned for violations. But now it seems that practically everyone on social media who chooses to publish or publicize the proceedings of a court, not comments after the proceedings but act of proceedings of the court and report the proceedings of the court will be subject to the same restrictions that the traditional media have always had through the years. In 2018 a British court jailed for 18 months the chair of the UK Legal Defense League Mr. Steven Yaxley-Leno. I think he also calls himself Tommy Morrison. Now here was a man who was broadcasting on social media outside the crown court in Leeds in the UK where a trial was taking place. He was accused of broadcasting live and within hours of his broadcast over half a million people had viewed the broadcast. The court felt that his actions could have cost the court the hundreds of thousands of pounds in rerunning the trial because of the prejudice that was introduced by his reporting of the case live in the manner that he did. Now the questions here of course is where are the limits and I hope that these are the questions that will be considered. Where are the limits to the sort of reporting that will take place because when you have a virtual recording such as we are here practically everyone of course recording actual recording of it can be controlled by the host. But it is possible for example even if you are controlling my even if you are controlling recording if our host today Shola is controlling the recording and is not allowing us to record. It's possible for me to have my own little camera just my phone here and I can record everything that has been said and done which is also possible for the virtual trial. I can run I can actually you know immediately broadcast this on social media. Now these types of problems and these types of situations what perhaps practice directions may have to address what are the limits. No one is allowed except with permission to publish live proceedings of a court but you know we need to really determine how this will work. We need to ask the relevant questions and I think that in developing these practice directions the media has to very quickly occupy the space so that the courts do not. Without adequate information or without adequate sensitivity to the rights of the press and all of that do not develop a set of practice directions that create more trouble than they are designed to solve. So I think that this is one of the reasons why this sort of conversations are important because I hope that the proceedings of our conversations here will go possibly to the Supreme Court. And possibly to the Chief Judges of our courts so that they get a sense of what needs to be done by well practice directions and what problems and issues may be one of obviously just by way of the sorts of considerations that media the media ought to have in reporting virtual virtual proceedings. Of course there are system requirements that have to be looked into. It's not enough for one to simply say that I have access or be given access. We have to look at all the system requirements. What I have found in the past few months where I have been involved in quite a few Zoom meetings or WebEx meetings and all of these different platforms is that very often if the devices on either side are not adequate or the bandwidth is not adequate, it just becomes a mess and it's impossible to actually get the best quality. So I think it's also important for some kind of standardization so that there is the equipment that we use are the right sorts of equipment that should be used for the purposes of these virtual court proceedings. My belief is that we are at a very interesting place in court proceedings. We have all been talking for years about computerizing our court systems, e-filing, etc. No one knew that we would quickly come to the place that we are in today. So in some sense it's thanks to COVID-19 we have been very quickly dragged into the virtual space and I think that it's a good thing and that is the case. One of the questions that I want to ask is that is the whole question around what type of platform will really serve our purposes in court proceedings, what type of platform. I know that several people already use virtual platforms for arbitration but for purposes of trials. I'm not so sure that this Zoom platform or these sorts of platforms are the best because we have to look at situations where we are examining witnesses, we are showing them documents, we are referring them to various documents. What happens in those situations? Do we suspend the rules of evidence or some of the rules of procedure? I mean how does a photocopy of a document look virtually? If you show me even an original document virtually, is it still an original document or is it a copy of an original view? So there are issues that we need to resolve, we need to resolve several issues of procedure and several issues of evidence just so that we are better able to navigate these proceedings in a manner that not only serves the ends of justice but also when some obedience the law. I think that an opportunity that this offers us is to get rid of as much technicality as possible. This is the opportunity that we are offered and I'm so pleased that the Supreme Court did not even hesitate in saying that as far as we are concerned, virtual proceedings are illegal. I mean it was really a breath of fresh air considering the way that we tend to magnify technicality to the point where sometimes you wonder where justice is when technicality assumes such huge dimensions. So I am hoping that the opportunity we have in virtual proceedings will also be an opportunity to dispense with several of the unnecessarily technical rules. That we have in our adjectival or in our laws of evidence, laws of procedure and all of that and hopefully we'll be able to get to the heart of trials and get to the heart of the matter so that we're not bogged down unnecessarily by technicality. So I would end it by saying again my thanks to the government national for putting this very important conversation together and to hope that this will be not only the last of these kinds of conversations especially around the drug court proceedings because I think the implications especially for our procedural laws and all that are so broad and so deep that we must certainly engage even much deeper in order to be able to arrive at a system and a framework that will work especially for the ends of justice. Thank you very much. God bless you all.