Part 1 of the State Protection in Nigeria series. The legal test expressly requires access. The practical question is what "able to access the protection" means for the person whose claim is actually being decided.
The familiar sentence in the refusal letter
One of the most common issues I encounter as a Nigeria country-conditions expert is State protection. In refusal after refusal, the Home Office reaches a familiar conclusion: Nigeria has a functioning police force and criminal-justice system; the authorities are generally willing and able to protect against non-State actors; the claimant has not shown that protection would be unavailable.
That conclusion may ultimately be right in a particular case. But it does not answer the question simply by identifying the existence of the police, criminal law, courts or specialist mechanisms. It's a relief to know the legal framework requires a further question: can this claimant actually access the protection said to be available?
Accessibility is part of the legal test for sufficiency of protection, not a secondary consideration after sufficiency has already been established.
The Legal Test Begins With A System But It Does Not End There
Horvath v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2000] UKHL 37 established the familiar practical standard. The Refugee Convention does not require the home State to guarantee immunity from all harm. In non-State actor cases, however, there must be a reasonable level of protection through a system capable of protecting citizens, a reasonable willingness by the authorities to operate it, and protection of which the individual can in practice avail themselves. Subsequently, R (Bagdanavicius) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] UKHL 38 made the preventative character of that standard clear. It is not enough that offenders can be punished after the event; the protective system must be capable of deterring or preventing the feared harm.
That distinction is now reinforced by statute. Section 34 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 requires both reasonable steps to prevent persecution through an effective legal system and that the asylum seeker is able to access the protection. The Court of Appeal in Secretary of State for the Home Department v CP [2026] EWCA Civ 892 treated those provisions as effectively codifying the existing law: the existence of an effective system and the individual's ability to access it are related, albeit distinct, parts of the inquiry.
The Upper Tribunal's 2026 country guidance in LR (Male VOTs) Albania CG [2026] UKUT 315 (IAC) is also useful because it applies the practical standard to a particular protection problem and assesses whether the system is capable of deterring or preventing harm, not merely punishing after the event.
Access is not an additional humanitarian consideration. It is part of the legal test.
There Are Two Accessibility Questions
There is also a claimant-specific element that is equally important. IM (Sufficiency of Protection) Malawi [2007] UKAIT 00071 and AW (sufficiency of protection) Pakistan [2011] UKUT 31 (IAC) preserve the distinction between protection available to the generality of citizens and the additional protection that a particular person may reasonably require because of the circumstances of their case. A country can have systemic sufficiency in general and still fail to provide sufficient protection to an individual whose risk profile requires more.
In Nigeria, both questions require separate scrutiny. Before asking whether a particular claimant requires additional protection, we need to question the ordinary level of protection against which those additional needs are being measured.
The first question is general. Can an ordinary citizen facing a credible threat from non-State actors ordinarily obtain timely, lawful and effective protection through normal institutional channels? The second question is individual. Does this particular claimant face barriers, or require additional protection, because of the nature of the threat, the identity and influence of the perpetrator, gender, sexuality, disability, age, location, poverty, family structure, social support, previous police response or another characteristic?
My proposition across this series is that Nigeria presents difficulty at both levels, and that each needs to be tested against the country evidence rather than assumed. There are substantial reasons to scrutinise whether ordinary protection is reliably accessible at all; and there are groups for whom the ordinary deficit may be further compounded by institutional bias, stigma, criminalisation or unequal social power.
What Does "Access" Actually Require Us To Ask?
Access is not established by showing that a police station is geographically present. Nor is it established simply because an offence is criminalised, an emergency number exists, a Gender-Based Violence Desk has been created, or a complaints mechanism is available on paper.
To make an adequate protection assessment, access has to be understood functionally. Can the person report the threat without encountering prohibitive financial, social or legal barriers? Can the responsible institution deploy? Does it have the resources and authority to intervene? Can an investigation continue without exceptional money or influence? Does the identity of the persecutor affect the response? What happens when the first response fails? Can the claimant escalate? And, can protection, once obtained, be reliably maintained for as long as the threat persists?
These are not demands for perfect policing. They are questions about whether the protection described in law and policy is practically usable by the person who needs it.
Why Claimant Characteristics Matter
We need to keep in mind that some claimants will require additional protection not only because the danger they face is greater, but because the characteristics associated with the danger may also reduce their ability to obtain protection from the State.
Women and girls provide an obvious example. A woman facing intimate-partner or family violence may need more intervention precisely because police attitudes, financial dependence, family pressure and ideas about the "private" nature of domestic disputes make intervention less likely. LGBTQ people raise an even sharper problem. Where aspects of same-sex intimacy and association are criminalised and stigmatised, the institution from which protection must be sought may itself be an active source of risk. Vulnerability is therefore not simply a measure of the external threat. It may describe the claimant's relationship with the protection institution itself.
The Role of the Country Expert
Whether the legal threshold of sufficiency of protection is met is ultimately a matter for the decision-maker or Tribunal. The country expert's task is different. The expert provides the specialist evidence to answer the legal question of accessibility: how the relevant institutions operate; what resources they possess; what barriers affect access; how they respond to this type and source of threat; whether protection can ordinarily be obtained without exceptional money, influence or intervention; and how the claimant's individual circumstances affect practical access.
This matters because a refusal letter may be legally correct to say that Nigeria possesses a police force, criminal law and courts while still leaving the decisive factual question unanswered: can the claimant get protection?
The legal test may begin with the system. The factual enquiry cannot end there.
The next installment turns to the first empirical problem: what does the existence of Nigeria's formal protection architecture actually prove?