THOSE aghast at attacks on judges in Ekiti State seem not to appreciate the implications of impunity. Criminals – of all shades – act mostly in the comfort that the law would not inconvenience them. Where they are able to intimidate law enforcement agents, they become more brazen.

Ekiti is the symptom, not the illness. The journey of diminishing the police, and other agencies of law enforcement, has arrived at a new bus stop, the judiciary. Threats to, and physical assaults on judges, in their courts, before the public, could be seen as the height of impunity, but it could get worse.

The biggest danger with impunity is that it bolsters the confidence of the criminals involved, and creates another level of lawlessness, where judges are not only afraid of a few slaps, but know their lives are at risk. Judgments would be affected, or some cases may not be heard, to protect the interests of criminals.

If judges can be assaulted while sitting, where would they be safe? If judges are not safe, who is safe? If thugs and their sponsors successfully cow the judiciary, they would over run the rest of us.

Why do criminals prosper in a society with structures to maintain law and order? Why could the violation of courts, unimaginable years back, happen? The police, the first line of protection for the law, have been compromised. They are rented out to protect individual interests, rather than the society’s. It does not matter to the police if those interests obstruct justice. The setting is reminiscent of incidents in countries where drug barons and other criminals control the system. Violation of the judiciary by political barons is worse. With power as their target, they acquire everything.

The executive deliberately minimises the powers of the judiciary through low allocation of resources and poor execution of policies that could enhance the constitutionally awarded freedom of the judiciary. These encumbrances mean that the criminals, who violated Ekiti courts, would not be punished. Would they?

Complaints about the low number of policemen at court premises, as a possible reason for the ease with which criminals assaulted judges in Ekiti, fail to address the motivation of the police. Are they interested in protecting justice? Did they perceive the incident in Ekiti as an affront to law and order? Did they not merely watch while the criminals operated?

Ekiti is not an isolated case. The judiciary is under much strain though the resistance Ekiti judges offered may not obtain elsewhere.

Until we punish this new wave of impunity, when we need justice we could discover there are no judges to dispense it because criminals have scared them away.