Reconstructing the Legal Personhood of Future Generations in Nigerian Environmental and Human Rights Law

This doctoral dissertation reconstructs the doctrine of legal personhood in Nigerian environmental and human rights law to accommodate the rights and interests of future generations, developing an original theoretical framework grounded in intergenerational justice theory and applied to Nigeria's pressing ecological and human rights context. Current Nigerian law, like most common law systems, does not recognize future generations as legal persons capable of holding rights or standing before courts, yet the long-term environmental consequences of oil extraction, deforestation, climate change, and constitutional resource mismanagement impose severe obligations on present decision-makers regarding posterity. The study engages with Hans Jonas's imperative of responsibility, Edith Brown Weiss's planetary trust doctrine, and comparative constitutional provisions in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uganda recognizing future generations' rights or the rights of nature. A theoretical-doctrinal methodology is employed, constructing an original theory of prospective legal personhood that is compatible with Nigeria's common law constitutional framework and its African Charter obligations. The theory is applied to test cases involving the Niger Delta environmental devastation, the Lake Chad Basin depletion, and the Climate Change Act 2021's intergenerational equity provisions. The dissertation proposes a constitutional amendment recognizing a Commissioners for Future Generations office, judicial standing for environmental organizations to litigate on behalf of future generations, and mandatory long-term environmental impact budgeting for all extractive licenses. An original contribution is the concept of custodial constitutional personhood applied to ecological commons in Nigeria. Keywords: future generations, legal personhood, intergenerational justice, environmental rights, Nigeria.