Published: May 22, 2026
MONROVIA — Five years and fourteen days after Joe Kolleh died in police custody in Nimba County, Liberia’s Supreme Court has reversed the lower court judgment that had awarded his family $450,000 in damages, not because the facts were wrong, but because the family’s lawyers filed their claim without first notifying the Ministry of Justice as required by law.
The ruling, delivered Thursday by Justice Boakai N. Kanneh, turns on a procedural requirement in Section 1.4 of Liberia’s Private Wrongs Law, which mandates that anyone seeking damages from the Republic of Liberia file a written Notice of Claim with the Ministry of Justice within 60 days of the alleged injury. The Court held that compliance with that provision is mandatory and affects subject matter jurisdiction. Without it, the lower court lacked the authority to hear the case at all.
The judgment was reversed without prejudice, meaning the family may restart the claim under the proper procedure. But for a family that has waited through five years of litigation, kept a body in cold storage at a funeral home, and watched a major damages award materialize and then disappear in the space of a single court session, the legal path forward offers little immediate comfort.
Kolleh was arrested by officers of the Liberia National Police in Ganta, Nimba County, on May 6, 2021. His family and human rights advocates alleged that he was physically assaulted while in detention and died within hours of being taken into custody. The government disputed those allegations, maintaining that medical findings pointed to natural causes.
The case reached the Eighth Judicial Circuit Court in Nimba County, where the family, represented by the Foundation for Human Rights Defense, secured a ruling that negligence had contributed to Kolleh’s death. The damages awarded were intended to compensate relatives and facilitate burial. That judgment appeared to mark a rare moment of accountability in a custodial death case. Then state lawyers appealed.
The Supreme Court’s opinion did not directly address the factual allegations concerning police conduct. It focused entirely on procedure, and on that narrow ground, it ruled that the lower court should never have entertained the case in the first place.
Standing before reporters on the steps of the Temple of Justice after the ruling, Foundation for Human Rights Defense Executive Director Torbor Tee Wonokay spoke less about legal doctrine than about the weight of time.
He described a family that had spent years in litigation believing accountability was drawing closer. He described a body still in a funeral home. And he described what he called one of the most painful realities of rights litigation in Liberia: winning in one court and being sent back to the beginning in another.
Wonokay said neither the family nor FOHRD had initially framed the matter as a compensation claim requiring formal notice to the Ministry of Justice. Their understanding, he said, was that the action centered on establishing responsibility for a death in state custody, not on payment. That interpretation collided with the Court’s reading of the statute.
The ruling carries implications beyond the Kolleh family. Custodial deaths occupy a distinct place in human rights law because individuals in detention are entirely under state control, with no ability to protect themselves. International human rights principles place heightened obligations on governments to protect life and investigate deaths occurring in state custody. None of that automatically determines liability, but it elevates the expectation of accountability, and in this case that expectation remains unresolved.
The questions at the center of the case, what caused Kolleh’s death, whether negligence occurred, and whether the state bears legal responsibility, are now subject to litigation again, if the family chooses to refile under the procedure the Supreme Court has prescribed.
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