The European Court of Human Rights as a Transnational Rights Actor: Implications for Nigerian Human Rights Jurisprudence

This doctoral study examines the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a transnational rights actor whose jurisprudence travels beyond the European human rights space to influence constitutional rights adjudication in non-member states, developing an original theory of transnational human rights norm diffusion and testing it through systematic empirical analysis of ECtHR influence on Nigerian constitutional rights jurisprudence from 2000 to 2024. The study advances original theory by building a Transnational Jurisprudential Diffusion Model (TJDM) that specifies the conditions, mechanisms, and limits of ECtHR influence in non-European common law constitutional systems. Drawing on Slaughter's transjudicialism, Buergenthal's international human rights law, and Nigerian constitutional jurisprudence, the study designs a rigorous empirical test of the TJDM. An original dataset of 300 Nigerian Supreme Court and Federal Court of Appeal constitutional decisions citing international human rights jurisprudence is constructed and subjected to systematic quantitative content analysis and qualitative jurisprudential case analysis. In-depth interviews with 30 senior Nigerian jurists, constitutional lawyers, and legal academics provide explanatory depth on judicial motivation for citing ECtHR authority. The study fills a gap as the first doctoral-level systematic empirical analysis of ECtHR influence on Nigerian constitutional adjudication, generating findings with implications for comparative constitutional theory and for EU-Nigeria human rights diplomacy. Keywords: ECtHR, transnational jurisprudence, Nigerian constitutional rights, human rights diffusion, TJDM.