About the publication Key reference work for diplomats and legal experts participating in international legal negotiations and transnational policy debates on governing the African continent. Highly recommended for developing courses, reading lists and other teaching materials on African International Law and African International Relations. Instrumental for developing innovative and impact-oriented research and policy strategies on the politics of making and implementing African International Law. What is African about African international law? The main aim of this book is to answer this question by developing a theory to explain how and why international law is Africanized. This includes explaining how Africanization relates both to the extent of continental norm setting by the Organization of African Unity and later the African Union, as the principal agent responsible for ‘African solutions to African problems’, and to the degree to which this African International Organization enforces these norms through varied continental accountability mechanisms. In this specific context, the book considers the different modalities through which the idea of Africa shapes, is shaped by and is embedded in international law making and implementation.
This volume analyses the prospects and challenges of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights in context. The book is for all readers interested in African institutions and contemporary global challenges of peace, security, human rights, and international law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This book critically examines the issues pertaining to the Rome Statute’s complementarity principle. The focus lies on the primacy of African states to prosecute alleged perpetrators of international crimes in their respective jurisdictions. The chapters explore states’ international and domestic obligations to hold perpetrators of international crimes to account before the national courts, and demonstrate the complexity of enforcing national accountability of alleged perpetrators of international crimes while also ensuring that post-conflict African states achieve national healing, reconciliation, and sustainable peace. The contributions reject impunity for international crimes whilst also considering these complexities. Emphasis further lies on the meaning of accountability in the context of the politics of selective international criminal justice for crimes committed before the establishment of the International Criminal Court.
"Decolonization restored African states' sovereign independence. The post-colonial period was, however, characterized by major economic disruptions that resulted in chronically weakened economies. The newly independent African states faced a profound dilemma between economic liberalization and openness on the one hand, and the maintenance of regulatory autonomy on the other. Confronted with unrelenting poverty and inadequate infrastructure, African states needed direct foreign investment to boost their economies. However, most foreign investors were cautious about investing in African countries due to the perceived lack of clear and predictable legal regimes necessary to protect foreign investments from expropriation and other forms of harm"--
This book is a philosophical inquiry into indigenous African legal ethics, asking what is African about African legal ethics? Taking us beyond a geographical understanding of Africa, the author argues for an African legal ethics that is distinct from non-African African legal ethics which are rooted in Euro-Western constructions. De-silencing African voices on African legal ethics this book decolonizes the prevailing wisdom on legal ethics and broadens our understanding of how law in Africa bears on ethics in Africa or, conversely, on how ethics bears on law in Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars of African philosophy, philosophy of law, and legal ethics.
This book offers the first comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the provisions of the ‘Malabo Protocol’—the amendment protocol to the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights—adopted by the African Union at its 2014 Summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. The Annex to the protocol, once it has received the required number of ratifications, will create a new Section in the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights with jurisdiction over international and transnational crimes, hence an ‘African Criminal Court’. In this book, leading experts in the field of international criminal law analyze the main provisions of the Annex to the Malabo Protocol. The book provides an essential and topical source of information for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of international criminal law, and for all readers with an interest in political science and African studies. Gerhard Werle is Professor of German and Internationa l Crimina l Law, Criminal Procedure and Modern Legal History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Director of the South African-German Centre for Transnational Criminal Justice. In addition, he is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape and Honorary Professor at North-West University of Political Science and Law (Xi’an, China). Moritz Vormbaum received his doctoral degree in criminal law from the University of Münster (Germany) and his postdoctoral degree from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is a Senior Researcher at Humboldt-Universität, as well as a coordinator and lecturer at the South African-German Centre for Transnational Criminal Justice.
In General Principles for Business and Human Rights in International Law Ludovica Chiussi Curzi offers an overview of the relevance of general principles of law in the multifaceted discourse on business and human rights. What are the implications of the state duty to protect human rights in good faith and to guarantee victims of corporate human rights violations access to justice? Can general principles of law, such as abuse of rights, due diligence, and estoppel provide a source of obligations for companies that is relevant to human rights protection? Has an autonomous principle on corporate liability developed in international law? These are the questions at the core of this monograph, which seeks the answers in the normative foundations of public international law.
With the increase in commercial transactions within the fifty-four independent African states and at the international level, it has become apparent that most of the legal framework for arbitration across the continent require reform. Accordingly, in recent years, as this first in-depth treatment of arbitration in Africa shows, jurisprudence from national courts of various African jurisdictions demonstrates that the courts are becoming more pro-arbitration and judges increasingly better understand that their role is to support or complement the arbitral process. This book documents the second SOAS Arbitration in Africa conference held in Lagos in June 2016. In thirteen lucid chapters, African practitioners and academics and European specialists in African legal and arbitral systems provide a remarkably thorough overview of the relation of courts and arbitration in the continent. Among the matters that arise for discussion are the: • disposition of courts in Africa towards arbitration, whether supportive or interventionist; • involvement of courts in the arbitral process before, during, and after an award has been rendered; • publication and access to arbitration-related decisions from African courts; • enforcement of annulled awards in African states under the New York Convention; • prospects for the establishment of a pan-African investment court; and • how foreign courts (particularly in the United States, France, and Switzerland) perceive African arbitration. Because of the wide range of developmental stages among Africa’s numerous court and legal systems, Part I of the book explores generic issues relevant to courts and arbitration, followed by detailed descriptions, including court decisions, of the situation in eight specific jurisdictions – Egypt, South Africa, Sudan, Mauritius, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and Kenya. The authors of these latter chapters are legal practitioners and academics from each of these countries. Throughout this book, policy recommendations for improving access to court decisions and laws in African states are brought to the fore. In its expertise-based advocacy for a mutually harmonious and supportive co-existence for arbitration and litigation in the context of the complexities and peculiarities of African states – and its confrontation of the predominantly negative perception that often leads to ‘arbitration flight’ from the continent – this book helps companies, investors, and their advisors to base their decisions on facts and not perceptions. It will be of great value to practising lawyers in arbitration as counsel or arbitrators, companies doing transnational business, global law firms, government officials, and academics in the field.
Using historical and anthropological analysis, this book examines the changing characteristics of nations globally; nation-building in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia; and the history of multi-culturalism in the Global South as an advantage to development in post-colonial conceptions of the nation.
