Pro-bono, public interest lawyering, and the fight for civic space in West Africa
During the 2025 Africa Regional Convening on Pro-Bono Week in Lagos, Nigeria, the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) partnered with PILnet to convene a high-level dialogue themed “Promoting Legal Safeguards of Civic Space, Frontline Defenders, and Social Movement Leaders in West Africa” on the 24 September 2025 under the auspices of the Civic Space Resource Hub (CSR-Hub) initiative.
In the wake of shrinking civic space in West Africa, civil society is facing a crisis of democratic backsliding driven by factors like resurgence coups, flawed elections, and the misuse of security laws. The civic environment is increasingly characterised by government repression, which includes introduction of restrictive laws, internet surveillance, and arbitrary arrests of activists, leading to diminished opportunities for political expression and human rights defence.
For instance, on the night of 20 October 2020, soldiers opened fire on unarmed #EndSARS demonstrators at Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, Nigeria. Amnesty International’s on-the-ground investigation confirmed at least 12 protesters were killed. A subsequent Lagos judicial panel report described the events as a “massacre,” detailing attempts to cover up the shooting by the State. In the days around the crackdown, security forces carried out mass arrests and detentions with little information of whereabouts of detainees – a pattern rights groups say has still not been fully addressed by accountability measures.
Image Source: Media Foundation for West Africa
In January 2024, Guinean union members and journalists gathered outside a courthouse in Conakry to support colleagues detained after a media crackdown. As dusk fell, Sékou Jamal Pendessa, a journalist and head of Guinea’s press union, was arrested and later charged with joining an “unauthorized demonstration” and publishing information said to threaten public order. He spent weeks in detention while unions weighed a national strike. A few months earlier in Ouagadougou, Daouda Diallo, a prominent human rights defender, vanished after men in civilian clothes seized him outside a government office. Weeks later, images surfaced of him in military fatigues, raising fears that critics were being pressed into forced conscriptions, an allegation later echoed by human rights groups. Diallo was eventually released, but not before his case became a symbol of how easily dissenting voices can be targeted and erased.
These snapshots are part of a broader pattern and a reminder that across West Africa, basic civic acts such as protests, organising, reporting, assembling, etc., can carry dubious legal risks. The CIVICUS Monitor now classifies civic space conditions in most African countries as obstructed, repressed, or closed, meaning the majority of people face serious constraints on their rights to speak, assemble, and organise. Only a handful of West African island states, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Principe remain open.
It is against this backdrop that PILnet’s Africa Regional Convening on Pro-Bono and Public Interest Lawyering met in Lagos, Nigeria with a goal to build enduring partnerships that can keep civic space open and make rights enforceable by linking civil society groups, human rights defenders, social movements, and media with a ready, capable, and supportive legal community.
“Access to justice is not charity. It is a right.”
Mr. Lawal Pedro, SAN, Commissioner for Justice, Lagos State, Nigeria
This line echoed during the convening captures the stakes: the right to organise, protest, report, dissent, and to operate as civil society only exists if people can enforce it.
What are the broad stakes?
Across West Africa, laws on assembly, association, and digital expression are often vague or selectively enforced. Authorities frequently lean on national-security or public-order provisions to restrict protests, burden watchdog organisations and civil society organisations (CSOs) with compliance hurdles and intimidate journalists with “false information” laws. Regional and international standards exist, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Commission’s Guidelines on Freedom of Association and Assembly, among others; however, their domestication or enforcement across national boundaries is inconsistent. The results have been arbitrary detentions, punitive deregistration threats, and the use of counter-terror frameworks against dissent. These conditions produce uncertainty and self-censorship while stretching civil society’s ability to respond.
Inside the WACSI-hosted panel
WACSI convened and led a high-level session, themed “Promoting Legal Safeguards of Civic Space, Frontline Defenders, and Social Movement Leaders in West Africa.” Moderated by Omolara Balogun, Head, Policy Influencing and Advocacy Unit at WACSI, the panel brought together civil society actors and legal practitioners, including Dr. Funmi Akinyele, Chief Executive Officer of CSO Accountability and Transparency Initiative (CATI), Mr. Deji Folson, Senior Legal Officer at Women Advocate Research and Documentation Centre, (WARDC), Mr. John P. Frinjuah, Programme Officer, Policy Influencing and Advocacy Unit at WACSI, Ghana, and Mr. Ridwan Oke, Senior Partner at Iris Attorneys LP, Nigeria. The conversation highlighted the following issues and made a concrete proposal for action.
Omolara Balogun moderating a session
What are the issues?
- Rules as roadblocks: Routine compliance from statutory filings to anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CTF) checks too often become a chokepoint that can be weaponised against social justice organisations, media and civil society. In West Africa, banks and regulators sometimes treat nonprofits as “high risk” by default, delaying transfers, demanding duplicative paperwork, or freezing accounts without proper risk profiling. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF’s) own 2023 update to Recommendation 8 warned against this misapplication and re-emphasised a risk-based, proportionate approach, while opening channels for nonprofits to flag harms from de-risking.
- Criminalising dissent: Protest remains a constitutional right in most jurisdictions, yet recently, authorities have leaned on counter-terrorism policies, cybercrime, and “false information” provisions to pre-empt citizen assemblies and/or punish dissent. A case in point is the 2019 detention and torture of two Ghanaian journalists on allegations of cybercrime. Public order regulations, security decrees, and online-speech statutes are often misapplied or weaponised to pre-empt or punish assemblies and free speech.
- Cost barriers: Across several jurisdictions, CSO registration or renewal, annual returns, board-governance filings, and audits can be overwhelming. These processes also often impose recurring cash and staff burdens, especially on small, community-based organisations. Analyses of Nigeria’s nonprofit framework under the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) illustrate how compliance time and professional fees can crowd out mission work for smaller CSOs that lack in-house counsel or resources to pay for legal services. Further, when CSO budgets are thin, paying for a lawyer to defend a protester or to challenge an unlawful arrest often means diverting inadequate resources meant for programming to over-demanding compliance requirements.
- Trust deficit: Years of uneven or selective enforcement have eroded public confidence that the justice system protects ordinary people. After Lekki Toll, denials, slow inquiries, and uneven remedies deepened skepticism. When new protests erupt, citizens expect delay, not justice. Rebuilding legitimacy requires reforming the justice system, ensuring transparent timelines for legal redress and measurable outcomes.
What is the way forward?
- De-weaponise compliance: Pursue targeted advocacy to reform civil society registration and filing requirements, i.e., reduce filing frequency and fees for non-profits, fee relief for small organisations, require appealable timelines for adverse regulatory actions, and publish transparent, risk-based checklists so organisations can comply without fear. Further, it is important to align domestic practice to the African Commission’s Guidelines on Freedom of Association and Assembly, which urge states to facilitate, not frustrate, these rights; and to FATF’s Recommendation 8, which rejects blanket “high-risk” treatment of nonprofits. Finance ministries, central banks, and financial intelligence units should work with CSOs to update AML/CFT procedures so they target abuse, not advocacy.
- Embed due process at protests: Scale a “lawyers-at-the-rally” model and pre-notify police, deploy trained legal observers, document arrests, trigger emergency habeas petitions, and publish post-event legal summaries, where possible. Scale a “lawyers-at-the-rally” model that pre-notifies police, deploy legal observers, document arrests, trigger emergency habeas petitions, and publish post-event legal summaries, where possible. Civil society groups and lawyer collectives in Ghana and elsewhere are already moving in this direction, and it should be encouraged across the region.
- Measure what matters: Invest in and publish periodic scorecards tracking incident-to-counsel response times, cases diverted or dismissed, compliance actions reversed, restitution secured, etc. Numbers and timelines rebuild public trust.
Crucially, none of actions above can be carried out by one sector, it must adopt a collaborative approach. The convening’s design, uniting law firms, CSOs, media actors, bar associations, legal-aid providers, and universities, reflects a durable truth that partnerships are crucial in ensuring an open civic space and environment for civil society operations.
The Africa Regional Convening on Pro-Bono and Public Interest Lawyering in Lagos set out to spark collaboration crucial to building sustainable legal support for civic resilience. WACSI is providing this support with its partners under the Civic Space Resource Hub (CSR-Hub) along four pillars: 1) civic space protection and regulatory compliance; 2) leadership and organisational governance; 3) resource mobilisation and financial resilience; and 4) digital security and protection. In a more recent partnership with PILnet, WACSI is exploring avenues within the Hub to link CSOs, social movements, and human rights defenders with pro-bono legal expertise and support across West Africa. At its core, this initiative recognises that the democratic future of the region depends on the ability of civic actors to safely assemble, publish, organise, and operate without fear of repression or undue restriction.
For more information on Civic Space Resource Hub, please:
- visit csrhubwestafrica.org
- write to csrhubwestafrica@wacsi.org or pia@wacsi.org
About the author
Omolara Balogun
Omolara Balogun is an international development practitioner with more than two decades of experience in non-profit leadership and social change programming across Sub-Saharan Africa. She is a civil society specialist and advocacy strategist, focusing on democracy, governance, gender equality, social inclusion, decolonisation, social justice and ecosystem resilience.
She heads the Policy Influencing and Advocacy Unit of West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI). She also oversees the Nigeria Office (WACSI Node), where she promotes the institute’s strategic interests in open civic space and an enabling environment for a dynamic, influential, resilient and sustainable civil society. Omolara is a thought leader, high-level convener and certified master trainer for the World Bank/IFC and Change the Game Academy (CtGA). She serves on the boards of several NGOs and non-profit coalitions in Africa and beyond.
She has academic backgrounds in Law and Development, Peace and Conflict Studies, International Relations/History, and Public Policy from universities in Nigeria, Ghana, Canada and the United States.
John Frinjuah
John is an international development practitioner, researcher, civil society expert, and partnerships specialist with extensive project implementation experience in the following programming areas: governance and democracy strengthening; education and health; civil society mobilization and capacity strengthening; peace and security; and youth, gender justice, and inclusive development across sub-Saharan Africa. He has extensive experience working with international development and civil society organizations in Ghana, the West Africa sub-region, and the United States.
He has also contributed to several policy-relevant research on development, democracy, governance, and security in Africa. His most recent on multilateralism is at the intersection of military doctrine and peacekeeping/peace support operations. This research, part of a commissioned work by the African Union, contributed to the most comprehensive review to date of African Union peace missions, "African Politics, African Peace", published by the World Peace Foundation in Boston.
John is an alumnus of the University of Ghana and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy - Tufts University in the United States, with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Masters of Law and Diplomacy from two institutions respectively. He’s fluent in English, proficient in French, and fluent in many Ghanaian and other regional West Africa languages.
He also consults on international development, security, governance, policy research and analysis, and advocacy. John can be contacted through LinkedIn, via phone at +233-55-040-6278, or email: FRINPARK@gmail.com
