Chidi Odinkalu, a professor of practice in international human rights law, criticized the ruling in a series of posts on X on Thursday.
Justice D.H. Khobo denied El-Rufai’s bail application on July 2, ruling that a medical document submitted by his legal team had been disowned by the National Hospital in Abuja.
El-Rufai faces criminal charges in three separate courts at the instance of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, or ICPC. All three courts have denied him bail. A fourth case in a Federal High Court Abuja brought by the Department of State Services, resulted in bail being granted, but with conditions his lawyers say are impossible to meet — including a requirement that he produce a level 17 civil servant who owns property in Maitama, an Abuja district where land prices run into the billions of naira.
In his posts, Odinkalu said all parties in the El-Rufai and ICPC case agree the charges against El-Rufai are bailable. He said the latest bail application was based on medical grounds, citing a report presented by a consultant at the National Hospital stating that El-Rufai has metastatic prostate cancer.
Odinkalu said neither side disputed that a licensed doctor signed the report or questioned that doctor’s qualifications. He said the ICPC instead countered with a letter from the hospital’s chief medical director stating that the hospital had no record of El-Rufai as a patient, and that the judge relied on that letter in denying bail.
Odinkalu, who has been critical of El-Rufai’s record on human rights during his time as governor, said his objection was not to holding El-Rufai accountable but to the reasoning behind the ruling.
“I take no position as to the contents of the medical report tendered in support of el-Rufai’s bail application,” Odinkalu wrote. “However, it is manifest judicial tomfoolery to dismiss a medical report based on the assertion of the CMD about what could be a failure of internal administrative protocols in the hospital group when the CMD is not held out as an attending physician or consultant.”
Odinkalu argued that a patient’s relationship is with an individual physician, not a hospital’s administration, and in the absence of proof that the doctor does not exist or is unqualified, there was no basis to discount the report.
“This decision on this bail application reeks of judicial malpractice,” he wrote.