Domesticating Cairo And Beijing: Prospects And Opportunities For Legal Obligations To Reproductive Rights In Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This thesis analyses the prospects and opportunities for law to protect reproductive and sexual rights in Nigeria, and the willingness and capacity of the legal system to promote women's reproductive health within the domiciliary region. It finds that the entrenchment of reproductive and maternal health clauses in state laws and government policies are indications that the Nigerian legal system has the capacity to domesticate international obligations and protect reproductive and sexual health rights in a national legislation. My research is an advocacy for legal action(s) to enforce the provisions of treaties, international platform documents and programs that Nigeria has ratified or signed with special implications for women's reproductive and sexual rights. The thesis outlines the potential for legal provisions to project the obligations of international and regional documents on women's health within Nigeria and acknowledges that, despite the proliferation of the term ‘reproductive rights' in universal instruments and national policies in the past one and a half decades, the transformative nature of the rights framework for reproductive health in Nigeria have remained legally unexplored. It examines the legal rhetoric of the agenda in Nigeria, the existing challenges to the realization of reproductive and sexual rights, the justification in contemporary society, and the prospects of achieving international standards within the State.