A
Federal High Court in Lagos, Wednesday, ordered the State Security
Service, SSS, to unseal the warehouse used by the All Progressives
Congress, APC, as data centre.
Justice Mohammed Yunusa also
granted an interim order restraining the SSS from further shutting
party’s data office or taking any step in connection with the property
pending the determination of the substantive suit.
SSS
operatives had, last weekend, raided the building which the opposition
party said was its data office at Allen Avenue, Lagos, arresting workers
and confiscating documents and computer hard drives.
The SSS said its action was based on a petition it received alleging “unwholesome activities” inside the building.
“Based
on this information, the service placed the building under surveillance
and having been convinced that some unwholesome activities were going
on in the building, it undertook a raid of the premises,” the SSS said
in a statement Sunday.
But the APC insists that the building was used for the collation of its members’ data.
On
Wednesday, the party, and its staff still under detention at the SSS
office, filed an action before the court seeking an enforcement of their
fundamental rights.
In their application, the detained APC
staff said they were only carrying out their legitimate duties of
inputting data from the APC’s physical membership form into a digital
database.
In its assertion, the party said the action of the SSS
in forcefully entering its data centre and vandalizing its physical and
digital assets was a violation of its right to property.
The
APC also stated that the “brazen conduct” of the SSS and the Nigerian
Police not only sought to intimidate the party’s staff and members, but
also compromised the confidential information of millions of Nigerians
who volunteered their personal information in accepting the party’s
membership.
The judge granted leave to the applicants to serve
court processes to the respondents – the Nigerian police and the SSS –
by substituted service, at their Lagos offices.
The judge also
ordered the respondents to produce the detained applicants (Chinedu
Atuche, Fayemi Olaposi, Chika Augustine Onuchukwu, Ebun Ilori, and
Esther Enemuwe) in court at the next adjourned date.
Credit: Premium Times
No comments:
Post a Comment