Critical Analysis Of Administrative Court’s Generous Approach To Standing And Third Party Interventions
Ibrahim Sule, PhD (Research Fellow) University of Utara, Malaysia; Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria and Fellow of International Bar Association. Teaches at Nigerian Law School, Kano Campus
ABSTRACT
This article critically examines the Administrative Court’s approach to standing and third party interventions. While citizens in any country should have ‘unrestricted’ access to courts to test the constitutionality and legality or otherwise of public body’s administrative actions, there should always be need to guard these public institutions against unwarranted, ill-founded and incessant interference of busy individuals. To make a balance between these interests i.e. the public interest that their administration processes should not be unnecessarily interrupted and the individual interest that courts should be accessible to him to put forward his complaint, English law provides for the requirements of standing. By this mechanism, claimants’ applications for judicial review would be filtered “in order to prevent the frivolous or vexatious applicant from troubling the already over burdened courts or overtly disrupting the administrative process.”2 This article is going to argue that the Administrative Court’s generous approach to standing presently is a welcome development. In order to do this, the uncertainty existed in the Administrative Court’s approach to standing before the enactment of Order 53 and Section 31 (3) of the Supreme Court Act 19813 will be discussed and analysed.
Keywords: Access to Court, Locus Standing, Third Party Interventions, Mandamus
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