The Clash of Legal Cultures: The Treatment of Indigenous Law in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

The judiciary and legislature need to adapt African indigenous law to make it a tool of socio-economic development without sacrificing the core values of African society: the values of fellowship, of being each other’s keeper, and the notion that the free development of each is indeed a condition for the free development of all. The modern African judge will be the first to acknowledge that, in many senses, the problems faced by the British judges in colonial Africa have not vanished. Almost one hundred percent of the African judiciary is now African. But even though there is no longer the gross disparity of national origin between a judge and his community, a judge often does not come from the particular locality whose ethnic law he is administering. Apart from this ethnic question, there is an enormous educational and cultural gap between a senior judge with a Western education and the ordinary families he may deal with. Thus, the judicial system may have moved from a problem of race and ethnicity to one of class

The Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention in Light of Robust Peacekeeping

Since the 19th century, humanitarian interventions have often been treated as suspect because they may be used as mere vehicles for national aggrandizement, imposition of puppets in power, or for the institution of political and economic systems detested by the indigenous population. However, it is also recognized that atrocities do occur within states, which shock the conscience of humankind and trigger the urge to intervene to save defenseless people from carnage, starvation, and other inhuman conditions. The problem is to identify a set of criteria and forms of behavior that will enable us to distinguish between intervention as aggression and genuine humanitarian intervention. Moreover, even if we see humanitarian intervention as a moral imperative in a Kantian sense, we would still need to establish its validity as a legal construct. This Article revisits the criteria for making the relevant distinctions and concludes that with all the operational problems of United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping, collective intervention by the U.N., or regional bodies sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council, is the approach most likely to conform with the U.N. Charter paradigm for conflict resolution

UN Peace operations and conflicting legitimacies

Analyses of UN peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources—in particular output and procedural legitimacy—and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and a specific case of the UN mission in Congo, this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical and it shows how the UN’s in contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions

Nation Building in Africa and the Role of the Judiciary

This speech was delivered at Northern Illinois University on April 20, 2007, as part of the Francis X. Riley lecture on professionalism. The speech highlights some of the difficult political issues faced by many African nations in arguing that legal professionalism imposes a duty on the judiciary to contribute to the building of long-term institutions of stability in fragile political environments