The ECOWAS Court’s own journal records two cases over Sowore’s arrest and the order to delete his account

INEC’s own final list of candidates for the 2027 presidential election - not a newspaper’s reprint of it, but the signed commission document, which we downloaded from inecnigeria.org and read - carries this candidacy on page 1 of three. The entry is printed surname first, as "SOWORE OMOYELE", against AAC, age 55, with MAGASHI HARUNA GARBA (49) as running mate. The qualifications filed with the commission are given as FSLC WAEC MASTERS DEGREE. The list is signed on every page by Rose Oriaran-Anthony, Secretary of the Commission. It names eighteen presidential candidates, two more than most published summaries of the field.

Omoyele Sowore publishes Sahara Reporters, has run for president before, and is the African Action Congress candidate for 2027. He has also been arrested and prosecuted repeatedly by the Nigerian state, which is the part of his record most often summarised and least often documented. We went looking for court papers rather than accounts of them.

Nigeria’s free case-law database holds nothing. A direct query to its own search interface for his name returns zero documents - no ruling from the treasonable-felony prosecution, no bail decision, nothing. That is a fact about Nigerian legal publishing rather than about Sowore, and it is why so much of what is written about his cases traces back to reporting rather than to filings.

The regional court publishes. The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States issues an Official Journal, free as a PDF, and volume 75 carries formal notices of the applications registered against member states. We downloaded it and read the relevant pages.

At printed page 123, suit number ECW/CCJ/APP/39/25 is recorded as filed and registered by the Court on 7 August 2025. The respondent is printed as "THE FEREDAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA", the journal’s own misspelling. The subject matter is given as violations "arising from the unlawful arrest, detention, physical assault, harassment, intimidation carried out by the Respondent and its agents against the victim."

One detail matters and is easily lost. Sowore is not the applicant. The case is brought by Comrade Ighorhiohwunu Aghogho, described as a member and former Delta State coordinator of the Take It Back Movement, "suing for himself and in a representative capacity on behalf of MR. OMOYELE SOWORE". It is a representative action, and anyone describing it as Sowore suing Nigeria is describing something the document does not say.

The orders sought are set out in the notice. The first asks the Court to declare that his arrest and continued detention on 6 August 2025 by officers of the Nigeria Police Force, without formal charge or arraignment, violated rights under sections 34, 35 and 36 of Nigeria’s constitution and articles 5, 6 and 7 of the African Charter. Another concerns the seizure of his glasses during a protest on 21 July 2025. The application asks for compensatory damages of $100,000,000.

A second registered case in the same volume, ECW/CCJ/APP/49/25, brought by Collins I. Maidoh-Anene and registered on 6 October 2025, is narrower and in some ways sharper. It asks the Court to find that a letter from the Department of State Services to X Corp, "demanding the deactivation of Omoyele Sowore’s X account and the deletion of all associated tweets and retweets", is censorship inconsistent with Nigeria’s treaty obligations, and that the DSS relied on repealed provisions of the Cybercrimes Act.

What we hold are registrations, and that limit is the whole of the caution here. A notice of registration proves that a case was filed, when, against whom and what it asks for. It proves nothing about whether the allegations are true. Neither matter had been decided when the volume was published, and an allegation in a filed application is an allegation, however formally it is printed.

What this rests on

The candidacy, the printed name, the age, the running mate and the filed qualifications rest on INEC’s own signed final list, read on the page. The ECOWAS Community Court’s own published journal, downloaded free from courtecowas.org and read on the page. The absence of Nigerian material rests on a direct query to NigeriaLII’s own search interface, which returned no documents for his name.

What this does not establish

These are registrations, not judgments; neither case was decided in the volume we read, and nothing here establishes that any allegation is true. It does not establish the outcome of any Nigerian prosecution of Sowore, because no Nigerian judgment involving him is published in the free database. We could not download the two ECOWAS judgments that merely mention him - the site serving them returns an automated block to anonymous requests - so we do not characterise them.