The Concept of Environmental Justice in the Nigeria Legal System (Published)
Environmental justice is a progressively advancing subject, social movement and practice, which requires fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all humans, regardless of sex, age, class, income, race, colour or nationality. Environmental Justice is geared towards the development, management, implementation and enforcement of plans, policies, laws and regulatory practices, towards the protection and management of the environment in the course of socio-economic development programmes, including projects. It also requires equitable distribution of benefits and thus indiscriminate exposure of all to environmental good and harm. It is an advancing social movement that advocates a healthy and eco-balanced environment, towards human’s wellbeing, sustainable communities and all-embracing sustainable development in the overall interest of society within the Planet (Mother Earth). The aim of the study is to examine the effectiveness of environmental Justice in Nigeria, with the view to ascertain if justice is actually done to victims of environmental degradation in Nigeria. The study found that there is need for courts to give wider interpretation to existing relevant fundamental rights to secure a healthy environment. Flowing from the above finding, the study recommends that Section 20 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should be amended to recognize the environment as legal personality with the citizens as its trustees. The study has shown that there should be an interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, policymakers, activist and civil society organization, who will work on environmental justice issues in Nigeria in fostering dialogue, sharing best practices and mobilizing collective actions, thereby enabling victims of environmental hazards get justice they deserve.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Legal, Nigeria, System
Functional Equivalence in Legal Translation: Legal Contracts as a Case Study (Published)
The aim of the present study is to investigate the applicability of Nida’s functional or dynamic approach in legal translation, specifically in translating legal contracts. It is also aimed at investigating the difficulties that translators encounter in translating legal contracts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and at shedding light on the translation procedures used by translators in translating legal contracts. Data were obtained from two sources. First, a translation task was assigned to two translators for the purpose of comparing and analyzing two translations each of five legal contracts. Second, a semi-structured interview was conducted to determine the real-world difficulties that translators usually encounter in translating legal contracts. The study revealed that serious problems arise from applying only the formal equivalence approach. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to legal translation that combines both the literal and the free approaches or the formal and the dynamic approaches, fully taking into account the lexical, syntactic, cultural, and stylistic factors in the translation process.
Keywords: Contract, Equivalence, Free Translation, Legal, Legal translation, dynamic equivalence, formal equivalence, functional equivalence, literal translation.
The North Korean Nuclear Crisis: An Assessment of the Legal Justification of the Use of Force by the United States (Published)
Since the outbreak of North Korean nuclear crisis, there have been many calls on the United States government to apply tougher measures on the DPRK to deal with its provocations and defiance on the Non-Nuclear Proliferation Regime. Tougher measures on North Korea include sanctions and the use of force. However, any eventual use of force by the United States on North Korea will be illegal if it does not meet the criteria of the Caroline Doctrine that requires that anticipatory self-defense be both necessary and proportional. Furthermore, any use of force that goes beyond the Caroline Doctrine will undermine the Articles 2 and 51 of the United Nations Charter that allows war only in self-defense. Given the fact that any use of force on North Korea will challenge the normative basis on which global society has been supported, it is imperative to solve the nuclear crisis through negotiations by continuing the Six Party Talks, with a commitment not only on the part of the DPRK to give up its nuclear program but also on the United States to sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Pyongyang that replaces the armistice of 1953, so as to assure that its survival as a State will not be at stake.
Keywords: Legal, North Korean, Nuclear Crisis, United States, Use of Force