Bulkachuwa: Despite panel dismissal of Atiku application, justice still goes ahead with decision

Appeal Court President Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa, on Wednesday, stepped down as a member of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal which he also chaired.

The PDP and its candidate Atiku Abubakar have opposed the membership of the justice because of her relationship to one of the defenders in the 2018 presidential election petition.

Bulkachuwa is the wife of one of the APC senators-elect, and the opposition believed that relationship could cloud her judgement.

The PDP nad its presidential candidate had to file an application over this.

Although the five-man panel of the tribunal, in a unanimous ruling dismissed the application, Bulkachuwa said she was withdrawing for “personal reasons.”

Justice Olabisi Ige, who read the lead ruling of the panel, held that the relationship between Justice Bulkachuwa and her husband, Adamu Bulkachuwa, who is a senator-elect, and her son Aliyu Abubakar, a governorship aspirant, both on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, was not weighty enough to infer that she would be biased in her handling of the proceedings of the panel.

Justice Ige also ruled that no inference of likelihood of bias could be inferred from the speech delivered by Justice Bulkachuwa at the inaugural sitting of the tribunal on May 8 that she had pre-judged the petitioners’ petition.

All the members of the panel, including Justice Bulkachuwa, agreed with the lead ruling.

Despite that, Justice Bulkachuwa said, “I am recusing myself from the panel for personal reasons.”

She, however, expressed joy that the matter had been settled “based on facts and the law” so that “another female judge will no longer have to face what I have faced.”

She said a new presiding Justice would be appointed for the panel, but that the four remaining members of the panel would continue with the hearing of the preliminary applications pending the appointment of the new head of the panel.

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