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Hope Behind Bars Africa (HBBA) is a Nigeria-based human rights organisation closing the justice and inequality gap through the use of legal aid, technology, support for incarcerated individuals and evidence-based advocacy. The organization, uses a social enterprise model in providing access to justice to indigent pre-trial detainees; with 7,500 justice-involved individuals having benefited from its interventions. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Hope Behind Bars Africa was established in 2018. It was founded by Nigerian lawyer Oluwafunke Adeoye who had a personal experience with the criminal justice system as a child when her father was unfairly treated by the system. [5] [6] [7]
In 2018, Hope Behind Bars Africa provided pro-bono legal services to indigent pre-trial detainees in Nigeria. It has represented 427 pre-trial detainees; also representing and releasing 90 pre-trial detainees linked to the #EndSARS movement. [8] [9] [10]
In 2019, the organisation had become a beneficiary of the Accountability Lab Incubation Program, the Accountability Incubator; with Oluwafunke also winning the SDG 16 Innovation Challenge for her web-based application “Connect Lawyer”. The app serves as an intersection between lawyers interested in offering pro-bono legal services and indigent pre-trial detainees requiring their services. [11] [12]
In 2023, HBBA partnered with Legend Golden Care Foundation to create the Accelerating Justice Reforms in Nigeria (AJURN) Project. AJURN is directed at the speedy dispensation of justice for detainees, and activation of the Non-Custodial Unit of the Correctional Service in Nigeria. [13] [14] [15]
The organization, has directly supported the empowerment of incarcerated persons either within the correctional centres or as they re-enter the society. [16] [17] [18]
HBBA has assisted over 50 offenders with a chance at quality education, through donations of educational materials, internet facilities, and payment of enrolment fees. The organization is partnered with Campaign to Decriminalise Poverty & Status, Catalyst 2030, NAMATI, and World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. They were granted UN ECOSOC status in June 2023. [19]
HBBA won 2022 UNLEASH Plus Dragons’ Den and 2023 Waislitz Global Citizen Awards. [20] [21]
Bruce Robert Jacob is a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Florida during the early 1960s. He represented Louie L. Wainwright, the Director of the Florida Division of Corrections, in the Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright, decided in March 1963, regarding the right to counsel of indigent defendants in non-capital felony cases in state courts. The attorney representing the Petitioner, Clarence Gideon, was Abe Fortas, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court. The previous 1942 Supreme Court case of Betts v. Brady required the appointment of counsel for an indigent defendant at state expense if there was a “special circumstance” present in the case which made it necessary for counsel to be provided for the defendant to receive a fair trial. For example, if the defendant was indigent and was extremely young, or lacked education or experience, was unfamiliar with court procedures, or if the charges against him were complex, the trial court was required under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to appoint counsel. Jacob argued against any extension of the defendant's right to counsel. The Court in Gideon overruled Betts and required state courts to appoint attorneys for defendants in all felony prosecutions.
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