International Copyright Conventions and Nigeria: Berne, Rome, UCC and TRIPS

When a Nollywood film streams in London, when an Afrobeats producer samples a Jamaican dancehall riddim, or when a UK record label licenses a Burna Boy track for an advertisement, a quiet question sits underneath the transaction: whose copyright law applies, and does Nigerian protection mean anything outside Nigeria’s borders? The answer lies in a small group of international treaties that Nigeria has joined over the past three decades. Understanding what these treaties require, and just as importantly, what Nigeria has and has not actually brought into its domestic law, is essential before any other topic in copyright law can be properly understood.

This article is foundational to the rest of the copyright cluster. It explains the major international copyright instruments, what each one requires of member states, Nigeria’s status under each, and the constitutional doctrine that determines whether any of it actually binds a Nigerian court.

1. Why International Copyright Law Exists

Copyright is, in its origin, a creature of domestic law. Each country’s legislature decides what works are protected, for how long, and what rights the protection confers. Left entirely to domestic discretion, this would create an obvious problem for any creative industry with cross-border reach. A Nigerian musician whose song is copied without permission in Ghana would have no protection there unless Ghanaian law happened to recognise Nigerian copyright. A foreign publisher could reprint a Nigerian textbook in a country where Nigerian authors had no standing to sue.

International copyright conventions solve this problem through a small number of recurring techniques: national treatment, which requires a member state to protect foreign works from other member states exactly as it protects works by its own nationals; minimum standards, which set a floor below which no member state’s domestic protection may fall; and automatic protection, which removes formal registration as a precondition for protection across all member states at once. Four instruments matter most for Nigerian copyright law: the Berne Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, the Rome Convention, and the TRIPS Agreement. A fifth pair, the WIPO Internet Treaties, matters for a different reason: Nigeria has signed but not domesticated them, which is itself one of the more important gaps in the current framework.

2. The Berne Convention: The Foundational Instrument

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, first adopted in 1886 and most recently revised at Paris in 1971, is the oldest and most influential international copyright treaty.¹ Nigeria acceded to the Convention, and it entered into force for Nigeria on 14 September 1993.²

Berne rests on three core principles.

National treatment requires that a work originating in one member state receive, in every other member state, the same protection that state gives to works of its own nationals.³ A Nigerian author’s novel published in Nigeria must be protected in France exactly as a French author’s novel is protected in France, regardless of any difference between Nigerian and French copyright rules.

Automatic protection prohibits member states from requiring any formality, such as registration or deposit, as a condition for copyright to exist in a foreign Berne work.⁴ This is the source of the now-familiar rule that copyright arises automatically upon fixation, without the need to register. It is worth noting precisely how far this rule extends: a member state may still impose registration requirements on works originating within its own territory, but it cannot impose those same requirements on works from other Berne states. Nigeria’s Copyright Act 2022 reflects the automatic protection principle for all eligible works, whether of Nigerian or foreign origin.⁵

Minimum standards establish a floor of protection that every member state must provide. Berne requires a minimum copyright term of the life of the author plus fifty years for most categories of work, though member states are free to legislate longer terms.⁶ It establishes minimum exclusive rights covering reproduction, translation, adaptation, public performance, and broadcasting. It permits member states to create exceptions to these rights, but subject to the so-called three-step test: exceptions are only permissible in certain special cases, that do not conflict with normal exploitation of the work, and that do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder.⁷ This three-step test is the analytical anchor that the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act 2022 must ultimately satisfy, even though the Act itself does not spell the test out explicitly. [See: Fair Dealing in Nigerian Copyright Law: What Changed Under the 2022 Act.]

For Nigerian students, the practical significance of Berne is straightforward. It means that the Nollywood film made in Lagos and the literary work published in Ibadan receive copyright protection not just in Nigeria, but automatically, without any registration step, in every one of the 182 other Berne member states.⁸ It also means foreign works enjoy the same automatic protection inside Nigeria, which is why a foreign publisher does not need to register a book in Nigeria before suing a Nigerian publisher for unauthorised reproduction.

3. The Universal Copyright Convention: A Fading Bridge

The Universal Copyright Convention, concluded in Geneva in 1952, was created largely because the United States and several other major states had not joined Berne and were unwilling to abandon the formal requirements, such as the familiar copyright notice symbol, that their domestic laws demanded.⁹ The UCC offered a lower common standard that allowed non-Berne states to participate in a multilateral copyright framework while retaining domestic formalities, provided the foreign work bore a copyright notice.

Nigeria is also a party to the UCC. In practice, however, the UCC’s significance has substantially declined since the United States joined Berne in 1989, and almost every UCC member state is independently a Berne member today.¹⁰ For a Nigerian student, the UCC is worth knowing as part of the historical architecture of international copyright, but Berne and TRIPS have effectively superseded it as the operative framework.

4. The Rome Convention: Protecting Performers, Producers, and Broadcasters

The Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, concluded in 1961, addresses a category of rights that Berne does not cover directly: the rights of those who perform, record, or broadcast a work, as distinct from the rights of the author who created it.¹¹ These are often called neighbouring rights or related rights.

Rome gives performers the right to prevent the unauthorised broadcasting or fixation of a live performance.¹² It gives producers of phonograms the right to authorise or prohibit the reproduction of their sound recordings.¹³ It gives broadcasting organisations the right to control the rebroadcasting and fixation of their broadcasts.¹⁴ Nigeria is a contracting party to the Rome Convention, and registered a reservation limiting reciprocal protection for foreign phonogram producers to the extent that the producer’s own country extends matching protection to Nigerian phonograms.¹⁵

The Rome Convention is directly relevant to the Afrobeats industry, where the rights of the performer, the rights of the record label that produced the recording, and the rights of the songwriter who composed the underlying musical work are legally distinct and frequently owned by different parties. When a radio station in Accra plays a Nigerian artist’s recorded track, at least three different categories of right are potentially engaged: the composer’s copyright in the underlying song, the performer’s related right in their performance, and the producer’s related right in the sound recording itself. Nigerian students often collapse all three into a single undifferentiated idea of “music copyright.” The Rome Convention framework, given domestic effect through the Copyright Act 2022’s provisions on performers’ rights and sound recordings, requires that they be kept separate.¹⁶

5. TRIPS: Copyright Inside the World Trade Organization

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, concluded in 1994 as part of the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the World Trade Organization, took a different approach from Berne, Rome, and the UCC.¹⁷ Rather than creating a standalone copyright treaty, TRIPS incorporated the substantive provisions of Berne by reference, requiring every WTO member to comply with Berne’s standards as a condition of WTO membership, regardless of whether that member had separately joined Berne.¹⁸ This is often described as the “Berne-plus” structure, because TRIPS goes further than Berne in several respects, most significantly by requiring computer programs to be protected as literary works and by adding enforceable obligations around effective domestic enforcement mechanisms, including civil remedies, provisional measures, and border controls against counterfeit and pirated goods.¹⁹

Nigeria has been a member of the World Trade Organization since its founding on 1 January 1995, and is consequently bound by TRIPS.²⁰ The enforcement obligations in TRIPS are significant for Nigerian students because they explain why the Copyright Act 2022 contains far more detailed and modernised remedies and enforcement provisions than its 2004 predecessor. TRIPS does not merely require Nigeria to recognise that copyright exists; it requires Nigeria to provide a working system through which rights holders can actually enforce it, including expeditious remedies and deterrent penalties.²¹

The persistent gap between TRIPS’ enforcement requirements and the realities of the Nigerian market, visible at Alaba International and in the volume of unlicensed streaming and downloading of Nollywood and Afrobeats content, is widely discussed in scholarship and is a legitimate point of critical analysis for students. It is one thing for a treaty obligation to be domesticated; it is another for the domesticated standard to be matched by institutional capacity to enforce it on the ground.²²

6. The WIPO Internet Treaties: Signed but Not Domesticated

The WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, both adopted in December 1996, are sometimes called the WIPO Internet Treaties because they were designed to extend copyright and related-rights protection into the digital environment: covering acts like making works available online, and addressing the circumvention of technological protection measures used to control digital access to copyrighted content.²³

This is where Nigeria’s position becomes genuinely instructive, and where most student resources stop short of giving the full picture. Nigeria signed both Internet Treaties in 1996, but as of the most recent Copyright Act reform, neither treaty has been domesticated into Nigerian law through an Act of the National Assembly.²⁴ This means that, strictly applying the dualist doctrine discussed in the next section, a Nigerian court cannot apply the WIPO Copyright Treaty or the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty directly, even though Nigeria is internationally bound by them as a matter of treaty law.

The Copyright Act 2022 narrows this gap substantially in practice, even without formal domestication of the Internet Treaties. The Act introduces protection for technological protection measures and rights management information, concepts drawn directly from the WIPO Internet Treaties’ framework, and creates a notice-and-takedown mechanism for online infringement.²⁵ A useful way to understand this for examination purposes is that the Nigerian legislature appears to have voluntarily aligned domestic law with the substance of the Internet Treaties’ standards, without going through the formal domestication route that section 12 of the Constitution would otherwise require for those treaties to bind Nigerian courts directly. The treaties remain, strictly speaking, unincorporated international obligations; their content has nonetheless found its way into binding domestic legislation through ordinary statutory drafting.

7. The Dualist Doctrine: Why Signing a Treaty Is Not Enough

None of the conventions discussed above automatically bind a Nigerian court simply because Nigeria has signed or ratified them. This is the consequence of Nigeria’s status as a dualist state, and it is the single most important constitutional concept underlying this entire topic.

Section 12(1) of the 1999 Constitution provides that no treaty between the Federation and any other country shall have the force of law except to the extent that it has been enacted into law by the National Assembly.²⁶ The leading authority is the Supreme Court’s decision in Abacha v. Fawehinmi.²⁷ Although that case concerned the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights rather than an IP treaty, its reasoning on section 12 applies generally to all treaties, IP-related or not. The Supreme Court, per Oguntade JSC (as he then was), held that no matter how beneficial a treaty might be to Nigeria or its citizens, the treaty remains unenforceable in Nigerian courts unless and until the National Assembly enacts it into domestic law.²⁸ The Court drew a clear separation between Nigeria’s international obligations, which arise the moment a treaty is ratified under international law, and Nigeria’s domestic legal obligations, which arise only once the National Assembly has acted.

This is the genuinely underexplored tension that students should understand. Achike JSC, in a separate judgment in the same case, took a more nuanced position, suggesting that once a treaty has been domesticated, it sits in an unusual position in the hierarchy of Nigerian law: superior to ordinary statutes in some respects, because Nigeria would be in breach of an international obligation if a later domestic statute were allowed to simply override it by implication, yet still subordinate to the Constitution itself.²⁹ The majority position from Oguntade JSC treats a domesticated treaty as taking effect at the same level as an ordinary Act of the National Assembly, capable of being amended or repealed by later legislation in the same way as any other statute. This difference matters practically: if a domesticated treaty is just an ordinary statute, the National Assembly could quietly erode Nigeria’s treaty compliance through a later, inconsistent Act. If it sits above ordinary statutes, courts would be expected to read later legislation, where possible, in a way that preserves the treaty obligation. Nigerian case law has not yet definitively resolved which view governs, and students who can identify and explain this tension demonstrate a level of analysis that most competing summaries of the dualism doctrine do not reach.

For IP purposes, the practical consequence of dualism is this: Berne, Rome, and TRIPS have, in substance, been given effect through Nigeria’s domestic IP statutes, including the Trade Marks Act, the Patents and Designs Act, and now the Copyright Act 2022, so a Nigerian court applying these statutes is, in effect, giving indirect effect to the underlying treaty standards. But where a domestic statute is silent, ambiguous, or actually falls short of a particular treaty requirement, as appears to be the case with parts of the WIPO Internet Treaties, the treaty itself cannot fill the gap. The domestic statute is what governs the outcome, full stop.

The constitutional architecture connects directly to broader principles covered in Sources of Law in Nigeria, where the relationship between the Constitution, legislation, and other sources of Nigerian law is examined in full. International treaties sit outside the ordinary hierarchy of Nigerian law entirely until the moment of domestication; before that, they exist as obligations of international law that bind the Nigerian state on the international plane, but create no rights or duties enforceable by a private litigant before a Nigerian court.

8. The Separation of Powers Dimension

Section 12 also reflects a deliberate separation of powers choice in the 1999 Constitution. The power to negotiate and sign treaties on Nigeria’s behalf belongs to the executive arm, exercised through the President under the general executive authority conferred by section 5 of the Constitution.³⁰ The power to give that treaty domestic legal effect belongs exclusively to the legislature, the National Assembly. Neither arm can unilaterally bind Nigerian citizens and courts to an international agreement; treaty law requires both executive negotiation and legislative domestication acting together.

This division has an under-examined consequence for IP policy. Nigeria’s executive branch, through its trade negotiators, can commit Nigeria internationally to standards, such as the WIPO Internet Treaties’ standards, well before the National Assembly gets around to domesticating them, if it ever does. This creates a structural lag between Nigeria’s stated international IP commitments and what is actually enforceable in a Nigerian courtroom, a lag of relevance to any student analysing why Nigerian copyright law sometimes appears to be playing catch-up with its own treaty obligations.

9. Problem Question Framework

When an examination problem raises an international or cross-border dimension to a copyright dispute, work through it in this sequence.

Identify whether the work in question originates in Nigeria or in a foreign Berne, Rome, or TRIPS member state. If foreign, national treatment under Berne and TRIPS means the work should receive the same protection in Nigeria as a Nigerian work, applying the Copyright Act 2022 directly, not the foreign country’s own copyright law.

Check whether the specific right or obligation in dispute is one that has actually been given effect through Nigerian domestic legislation. Do not assume that because Nigeria has signed a convention, the convention’s standard is directly enforceable. Trace the right back to a specific provision of the Copyright Act 2022, the Trade Marks Act, or the Patents and Designs Act. If you cannot locate a domestic provision giving effect to the treaty standard, state plainly that the treaty itself cannot be applied directly by a Nigerian court because of section 12 and Abacha v. Fawehinmi.

Where the dispute involves digital or online infringement, consider whether the conduct falls within the Copyright Act 2022’s technological protection measures and notice-and-takedown provisions, which substantially reflect WIPO Internet Treaty standards even though those treaties remain formally undomesticated.

Where the dispute involves a performer, producer, or broadcaster rather than the original author, apply the related rights framework drawn from the Rome Convention, and keep the underlying authorial copyright analytically separate from the performer’s or producer’s related right.

10. Common Student Mistakes

Assuming that signing or ratifying a treaty makes it enforceable in Nigerian courts. This is the single most common error in this topic area. Signature and ratification create obligations under international law; only domestication by the National Assembly under section 12 creates obligations enforceable by a Nigerian court.

Treating the Universal Copyright Convention as still operationally significant. Students sometimes give the UCC equal weight to Berne in an answer. In practice, Berne and TRIPS have eclipsed the UCC almost entirely since the United States joined Berne in 1989.

Confusing the author’s copyright with a performer’s or producer’s related right. These are legally distinct categories of right, governed historically by different conventions, Berne for the former and Rome for the latter, even though the Copyright Act 2022 now houses both within a single domestic statute.

Failing to identify that the WIPO Internet Treaties have not been domesticated. Many students assume, incorrectly, that because the Copyright Act 2022 contains provisions on technological protection measures, Nigeria must therefore have domesticated the WCT and WPPT. The better and more precise answer is that the domestic statute independently creates similar protections, without those underlying treaties themselves having been formally brought into Nigerian law.

Citing TRIPS provisions as though they were self-executing. TRIPS requires WTO members to meet certain standards, but in a dualist state like Nigeria, those standards bind Nigerian courts only to the extent that domestic legislation, such as the Copyright Act 2022, has actually implemented them.

11. Quick Reference Table

12. Key Cases

Abacha v. Fawehinmi (2000) 6 NWLR (Pt. 660) 228 is the leading Nigerian authority on the status of international treaties in domestic law. The Supreme Court held that a treaty, however beneficial, has no force of law in Nigeria until the National Assembly enacts it into domestic legislation under section 12(1) of the Constitution. The case did not concern intellectual property directly but its reasoning governs the status of every IP convention discussed in this article. Students should also note the separate judgment of Achike JSC, which took a more nuanced view of where a domesticated treaty sits relative to ordinary legislation, creating a genuine, unresolved tension within the case itself that is worth identifying in any sophisticated answer.

Footnotes

¹ Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as revised at Paris, 24 July 1971, and amended 28 September 1979).

² WIPO, Notification of Accession by the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Treaty/Berne/147, confirming entry into force for Nigeria on 14 September 1993.

³ Article 5(1), Berne Convention.

⁴ Article 5(2), Berne Convention.

⁵ Section 1(2), Copyright Act 2022.

⁶ Article 7(1), Berne Convention.

⁷ Article 9(2), Berne Convention.

⁸ WIPO, list of Contracting Parties to the Berne Convention (current membership figures maintained by WIPO Lex).

⁹ Universal Copyright Convention, Geneva, 1952.

¹⁰ WIPO Lex, Universal Copyright Convention membership records.

¹¹ International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, Rome, 26 October 1961.

¹² Article 7, Rome Convention.

¹³ Article 10, Rome Convention.

¹⁴ Article 13, Rome Convention.

¹⁵ Nigeria’s instrument of accession to the Rome Convention, reservation under Article 16(1)(a)(iii).

¹⁶ Sections 4 and 5, Copyright Act 2022, on the rights of performers and producers of sound recordings.

¹⁷ Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Annex 1C of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, signed in Marrakesh, Morocco, 15 April 1994.

¹⁸ Article 9(1), TRIPS Agreement.

¹⁹ Articles 10 and 41, TRIPS Agreement.

²⁰ World Trade Organization, list of WTO members and accession dates.

²¹ Article 41(1), TRIPS Agreement.

²² Adamu A. Pam and John Ishaku Mantu, ‘An Appraisal of the Legal Framework on Confidential Information and Trade Secrets in Nigeria’ (SSRN Working Paper, 2019), discussing the broader enforcement gap across Nigerian IP law.

²³ WIPO Copyright Treaty, Geneva, 20 December 1996; WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, Geneva, 20 December 1996.

²⁴ Sandra Eke, ‘Non-domestication of Treaties in Nigeria as a Breach of International Obligations’ (S.P.A. Ajibade & Co, 2020).

²⁵ Section 28, Copyright Act 2022.

²⁶ Section 12(1), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.

²⁷ Abacha v. Fawehinmi (2000) 6 NWLR (Pt. 660) 228.

²⁸ Abacha v. Fawehinmi (n 27), per Oguntade JSC.

²⁹ Abacha v. Fawehinmi (n 27), per Achike JSC.

³⁰ Section 5(1), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.