Ayo Obe
Ayo Obe (née Ogunsola) is a legal practitioner and a partner, with Chief Olasupo Shonibare, in the Lagos-based law firm, Ogunsola Shonibare. Since April 2006 she has also headed the Elections Program of the National Democratic Institute’s Nigeria office in Abuja.
A member of several boards and projects, Ms. Obe chairs the Board of Trustees of the Goree Institute (Senegal) and is also a trustee of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. In Nigeria, she is a member of the boards of the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN), the Z.O. Dibiaezue Memorial Libraries and the community-based Ajegunle Community Project in Lagos. She is on the board of the Dakar-based Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) and also participated as a member of the international advisory group of the Managing Global Insecurity project of the Brookings Institution, and New York and Stanford Universities.
Ms. Obe was President of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), Nigeria’s oldest indigenous human rights organisation from 1995 to 2003, a period spanning the despotic rule of General Sani Abacha and Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in May 1999. She chaired the Transition Monitoring Group, an election-monitoring/democracy-building coalition of independent NGOs, from 1999 to 2001. From 2004 to April 2008, she was chair of the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy and was on the African Democracy Forum’s steering committee. Ms. Obe represented Nigerian Human Rights NGOs on the country’s Police Service Commission from November 2001 to 2006.
In addition to articles published both at home and abroad, Ms. Obe wrote a weekly column on current affairs for a year, and presented “You and the Constitution” on nationwide television in Nigeria. She has delivered several lectures and papers on a variety of human rights and democracy-related subjects, including the 2nd Annual lecture of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, papers on Shari’a Law in Nigeria at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, and at Yale University. As a member of the Transparency Task Force of Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue, she contributed the chapter on Nigeria’s quest for freedom of information legislation to the C.U.P.’s recent publication The Right to Know.
Ms. Obe was born in the United Kingdom on the 24th May 1955 and is a Nigerian and British citizen by birth. She schooled in Britain and Nigeria, received her LLM from the University of Wales and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1978. She lives in Lagos, and has one daughter.