ANALYSIS OF THE SUPREME COURT’S NEW JURISPRUDENCE OF AWARD OF EXEMPLARY COSTS IN ABUSE OF PROCESS CASES

Abstract

A fundamental principle in civil proceedings is that costs are awarded to indemnify a prevailing party for theexpenses in the proceedings. A corollary to this principle is that costs must not be awarded to penalise a party.Application of these two principles establishes a jurisprudence in which appellate courts invariably set asideawards by lower courts where the awards are either so large as to be unexplainable, or are clearly stated to bepunitive. On February, 26, 2020, in the most ginormous award of costs made in Nigerian legal history, theSupreme Court penalised two senior counsel for filing applications which the Court found were vexatious,frivolous and a gross abuse of court process. This award created a new jurisprudence of amercement in exemplarycosts as cumulative to the traditional remedy of striking-out an abusive proceeding. This paper analysed thepurport and effect of this new jurisprudence and its effect on the traditional jurisprudence that restricted responseto abuse of process to a striking out of the abusive proceeding. In part 2, the paper set out the basic principle ofindemnity as the purpose of costs, and in part 3, analysed the difference between costs on the one hand, and finesand penalties on the other. In part 4, the paper examined the introduction of punishment as a purpose of costs inmost rules of court. In part 5, it scrutinised the functus officio rule, the powers of the Supreme Court to correctits judgments, the concept of abuse of court process and the traditional response to an abusive process. This ledto part 6 in which the paper interrogated the new jurisprudence of the Supreme Court which makes an orderstriking out an abusive proceeding cumulative to penal costs against counsel implicated in the abusive proceeding.Thereafter it concluded.