NGScorecard

Grants every Nigerian a legal right to request records and information held by government agencies, subject to defined exemptions, ending 12 years of the bill being repeatedly introduced and stalled since the return to democracy in 1999.

Signed into law in Jonathan's first year as elected president. It gave civil society and journalists a durable legal tool that outlasted his own administration, though compliance by federal MDAs was inconsistent from the outset and remained a persistent enforcement gap.

Mandates minimum levels of Nigerian ownership, employment, and sourcing in oil and gas industry contracts and operations, aiming to build domestic capacity in a sector historically dominated by foreign expertise and imports.

Signed within Jonathan's first weeks as substantive president, the Act is credited with growing local content spending in the oil sector from a low base to tens of billions of dollars over the following decade, and remains in force as a foundational piece of Nigerian oil and gas regulation.

Amended the Electoral Act ahead of the 2011 general election to strengthen INEC's independence, tighten candidate nomination timelines, and improve voter registration procedures using a new biometric register.

The amended framework, combined with INEC's new leadership under Attahiru Jega, underpinned the 2011 general election, which was widely assessed as the most credible since Nigeria's return to democracy in 1999.

Established a legal framework for defining and prosecuting acts of terrorism in Nigeria for the first time, following a wave of Boko Haram bombings including the June 2011 attack on the Nigeria Police Force headquarters in Abuja. Amended in 2013 to expand definitions and penalties.

Provided the legal basis subsequently used to prosecute Boko Haram suspects, though the pace of prosecutions remained slow relative to the scale of arrests, and thousands of terrorism suspects remained in prolonged pre-trial detention for years after the law's passage.

Criminalises same-sex marriage, civil unions, and the operation or public support of gay clubs, societies, and organisations, with penalties of up to 14 years' imprisonment.

Signed into law to strong domestic support but sharp international criticism from Western governments and human rights groups, who said it would fuel violence and discrimination against LGBT Nigerians. The law remained in force well beyond Jonathan's term.

Establishes a framework for regulating and financing Nigeria's health system, including creation of the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF) to channel at least 1% of the Consolidated Revenue Fund toward primary healthcare, after a decade of the bill stalling in the National Assembly.

Signed in the final months of the term after years of delay, but the BHCPF was not funded or operationalised before Jonathan left office in May 2015 — implementation and the first actual disbursements only began under the succeeding administration years later.

Comprehensive proposed overhaul of Nigeria's oil and gas legal and fiscal framework, intended to modernise regulation, attract investment, and share host-community benefits, first introduced under Yar'Adua and reintroduced during Jonathan's term.

Despite years of committee work and industry lobbying, the bill never passed the National Assembly during Jonathan's presidency, extending a legislative logjam that had already run for several years and would not be resolved until 2021 under a later administration.

Criminalises a broad range of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and harmful widowhood practices, and provides for compensation and protection orders for survivors.

Signed just four days before leaving office, after over a decade of civil society advocacy, the Act became one of Nigeria's landmark gender-based violence laws, though it initially applied only within the Federal Capital Territory, requiring individual states to separately domesticate it — a process that remained incomplete in many states for years afterward.

A package of proposed constitutional amendments considered around the 2010-2011 period, including independent candidacy for elections not sponsored by a political party and removal of immunity for governors and the president from prosecution for corruption while in office.

Both the independent candidacy and anti-immunity proposals failed to secure the required legislative support and were dropped, leaving Nigeria's presidential and gubernatorial immunity provisions unchanged and candidacy still restricted to registered political parties.

Strengthened the National Human Rights Commission's independence and enforcement powers, including giving its recommendations and awards the force of a court order and improving its funding autonomy from the executive.

Signed into law in Jonathan's first year, giving the Commission stronger legal teeth than it had previously had, though its practical impact was constrained for the rest of the term by the scale of human rights abuses linked to the Boko Haram conflict, which stretched well beyond the Commission's institutional capacity to investigate.