Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution: Africa — Regional Strategies for the Prevention of Displacement and Protection of Displaced Persons: The Cases of the OAU, ECOWAS, SADC, and IGAD

This Article seeks to examine the preparedness of certain African regional actors to protect displaced persons in times of armed conflict, and to prescribe formulas to strengthen the capabilities of such actors. The objective is to assess the conflict maintenance capacities of African regional actors and their partners to provide physical and legal protection to displaced persons in times of armed conflict, and likewise to recommend strategies to increase protection

Domesticating International Law Through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: The Case of the Liberian TRC

African states actively domesticate international law through judicial capacity-building in, for example, Botswana’s Industrial Court’s use of the Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and International Labor Organization conventions in the Moatswi v. Fencing Center case; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana’s creation of the Human Rights Division of the Ghana High Court; and the institution of a sexual crimes division—Liberia’s Court ‘‘E’’—by the Liberian legislature. Moreover, high courts in Africa have demonstrated their willingness to adjudicate cases using regional and international law. For instance, in Kaunda v. President of the Republic of South Africa, the case turned on whether South African mercenaries who had been captured in Zimbabwe and threatened with prosecution and capital punishment after an unfair trial in a third state could claim diplomatic protection from South Africa, i.e., could claim a right to be extradited back to South Africa. In 1990 Benin’s Constitutional Court determined that the ACHPR was an ‘‘interpretive tool’’ for the constitution, including its ‘‘freedom to associate’’-related provision. In 2001 the Botswana High Court in Unity Dow employed international human rights law to challenge the constitutionality of its 1982 Citizenship Act, and in the 2000 Windhoek Prison case, the Namibian Supreme Court used the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention Against Torture (CAT) to determine that chains or mechanical restraints violated a person’s right to dignity, and his or her right not to be tortured or subjected to degrading and inhumane treatment. While these courts and cases provide only a brief snapshot of the various ways in which international law has been and is being used by African judiciaries, it is important to note that this phenomenon is not exceptional. While few know about the impact of international law on domestic courts, much less is known about the normative force that truth and reconciliation commissions have played in fashioning and domesticating international rules. Hence the forgoing analysis will focus on the various and distinct ways in which the Liberian TRC not only applied and domesticated international law, but also how it made a normative contribution to the practice of truth commissions and transitional justice, namely the human rights protective regime. Before I embark in this intellectual exercise, however, it is important briefly to highlight the mission and mandate of the ITAC and TRC, as well as their use of international law to fulfill their mandate as quasi-judicial mechanisms

The Responsibility to Protect: A Beaver Without a Dam Review of The Responsibility to Protect: Reprot of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

The beaver\u27s dam is comparable to protective intervention for at-risk populations.\u27 Beavers need dams to enlarge the underwater habitat that will be open to them in winter, by creating a pond deep enough so that the bottom will not freeze. Humanitarian corridors and safe havens serve parallel functions for displaced civilians during times of conflict. Deep water, whether it is due to a beaver dam or not, provides storage for winter food and year-round underwater access to the den secure from predators. The shelter and safety deep water provides can be likened to the physical protection needed to safeguard civilians and aid convoys, deliver humanitarian supplies, forcibly disarm belligerents, and shield humanitarian workers during and after conflict. Increasing the area of the pond through damming and additional downstream impoundments provides safer access to additional food supplies for beavers in the same way that buffer or no-fly zones protect vulnerable civilians. The Responsibility to Protect can be likened to the beaver because it seeks to build a dam of protection through the actions of the international community, to safeguard and preserve human life in nations whose governments fail to do so. Just as beavers without dams are more at risk of death and starvation during the winter season, people in areas of conflict that lack buffer zones are similarly at risk year round. This analysis seeks to determine whether the report adequately lays out a viable strategy for the international community that complements, in human terms, the protective rationale or logic behind the beavers\u27 dam, by providing a framework for intervention to protect at-risk populations in such a manner as to minimize human suffering and loss of life

The Responsibility to Protect: A Beaver Without a Dam?

Review of International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect and The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background (Supp. Vol. to the Responsibility to Portect by Thomas G. Weiss & Don Huber

The Responsibility to Protect: A Beaver Without a Dam?

Review of International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect and The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background (Supp. Vol. to the Responsibility to Portect by Thomas G. Weiss & Don Huber

Regional Security and the Challenges of Democratisation in Africa: The Case of ECOWAS and SADC

In recent years, African leaders have aggressively sought to strengthen their regional security structures while simultaneously attempting to democratise. Although they recognise that African regional organisations will need to assume a greater role in tackling Africa\u27s security problems, the challenges posed by on-going democratisation efforts have had a visible impact on the effectiveness of some regional organisations. This article examines the challenges that democratisation poses to regional collective security arrangements in Africa, with specific reference to ECOWAS and SADC. It argues that whilst the inclination to democratise has influenced the establishment of new collective security structures, the superficial nature of the changes have prevented the gains at the structural level to be translated to meaningful practice on the ground. Nevertheless, some progress has been made

The Evolving Intervention Regime in Africa: From Basket Case to Market Place?

The analysis that follows aims to present dynamic new information about pressing law of the use of force and peacemaking developments in Africa. It is meant to be more descriptive than analytic. It will discuss, among other things, the evolution of the international law of the use of force by assessing state practice and treaty law developments in Africa since the end of the Cold War-developments that undoubtedly form an important part of the evolution of the corpus of general international law. Space constraints will not permit me to examine the legality of the various African interventions that have taken place since the end of the Cold War (the majority of which took place without UNSC authorization). These include the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) interventions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and now Guinea; the Mission for the Implementation of the Bangui Agreement (MISAB) in the Central African Republic (CAR); and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) operation in Lesotho. I will nonetheless discuss the efficacy of the regional frameworks that gave them impetus.1 I will also refer to the intervention provisions in the new Constitutive Act of the African Union (AU), which in late 2002 will replace the Organization of African Unity as the premier continental organization in Africa. Not only is Africa the first region to advance comprehensive intervention regimes, but the ones it advances are leagues ahead of the other regions of the world. African state practice and treaty law developments since the end of the Cold War illustrate that, with some exceptions, African nations have been among the most committed to creating peace both within and outside of Africa

Pro-Democratic Intervention in Africa

In the past twenty years the people of the African continent have experienced human suffering on a scale unparalleled in human history. For the past decade I have examined and documented the evolution of Africa\u27s peacekeeping, peace enforcement, regional collective security, and conflict management landscape as well as Africa\u27s contribution to international law, particularly as it relates to the jus ad bellum, the law of the use of force . Although an abundance of scholarly work and official studies have examined the complexities of humanitarian intervention, only a select body of credible work has considered the phenomenon of pro-democratic intervention (PDI)--very little of which has made mention of Africa. This Article offers a conceptual framework to locate PDI in international law. It is limited to the identification of PDI as an emerging norm of international law deeply rooted in the African experience

Illegal Peace? Power Sharing with Warlords in Africa

This paper examines the legality of power-sharing in Africa with specific reference to the Accra and Lome accords, which brought about a fragile cessation of the conflicts in Liberian and Sierra Leone, respectively. It examines the future of international criminal law vis-a-vis power-sharing by prospectively examining gaps in state practice and rules that arguably permit the crime of illegal peace by insurrectionists, political elites, and moral guarantors. When warlords use violence to coerce democratically constituted governments to share power, does power-sharing simply become a euphemism for guns for jobs ? Which legal rules, if any, govern peace agreements in internal conflicts? Specifically, which rules regulate power-sharing? Are the aims of peace, justice, and adherence to the rule of law attainable, let alone compatible, with coerced political transitions where warlords violently force democratically constituted or legitimate governments to share power? Should international law criminalize political elites that share power with warlords and rebels that have committed gross human rights and humanitarian law violations