Press Releases

Fashola Says No Fundamental Problem With Coroner's Law

Aug 19, 2008 - Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), Tuesday said there was no fundamental problem with the more than 50-year-old Coroner’s Law insisting that the overall intention was to protect the citizens’ right to life

On the alleged piling of dead bodies in various hospitals as a result of the Law, Fashola warned Chief Medical Directors in State Hospitals not to prevent people from taking custody of the remains of their relations at the hospital morgues saying there was no reason to hold such bodies from burial if the cause of death was determined.

Governor Fashola, who spoke against the backdrop of the reaction of stakeholders in the Medical sector, especially the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) to the law, however, attributed the controversy to some typographical errors on the Law which, according to him, are being addressed.

According to the Governor, the errors occurred in differentiating between “natural” and “unnatural deaths” where instead of saying people who died in “unnatural circumstances” it was typed “natural” and also in typing “custody” instead of “psychiatric custody”.

The Governor said that the Government was the first to notice the typographical errors and immediately started the process of correcting them.

“There is really no fundamental problem with the Law. The Coroner Law was established in 1954 and first amended in 1972 and later in 2003 before the latest amendment”, the Governor said, adding that it was usually the human factor and not the laws themselves that usually present the problem.

Governor Fashola, who said the Law has been part and parcel of Lagos State, declared, “In terms of burial rights, it has not affected the burial rights of people and their relations as people are suggesting. People still go ahead and bury their dead where cause of death can be determined”, citing the case of the late Newspaper Mogul, Alhaji Babatunde Jose, who was buried according to Muslim rites on the same day.

According to the Governor, the Law only came into effect where people died under questionable circumstances like where there were reasons to suspect that a patient died as a result of negligence or in unnatural circumstances, adding, “If a man dies at the age of 90 years, there is nothing unnatural about it, he died as a result of age”.

Governor Fashola said the Law was made to protect such people as those in psychiatric hospitals who needed other people to take care of them pointing out that there had been cases of abuse of patients and other such practices that sometimes resulted in the death of the patients.

“We owe a duty to ask why and how such deaths happened. This is the only way we can prevent such deaths from happening in the future. It is not meant to infringe on the peoples’ right to bury their dead”, the Governor said.

Welcoming the intervention of the NMA in the matter, Governor Fashola said, “It is a participatory democracy and their intervention has helped us to look more closely into the Law. We welcome the intervention” adding that the duty of the Government was to uphold the Laws of the State.