In November 2021, the Chair for African Legal Studies is hosting a conference on the Continuous Search for Coherence in Africa’s Plural Legal Systems. From November 17th-20th several coloqiums will be held as well as lectures. Everyone is kindly invited to join the conference and take part in exciting debates.
Botswana’s jurisdiction is well-known for its past ground-breaking decisions and thereby courageous commitment to protect human rights[1]. With the recent decision “Letsweletse Motshidiemang v The Attorney-General (LEGABIBO as amicus curiae)” Botswana’s jurisdiction has once more broken new legal grounds for the country and beyond. In 2019, the High Court of Botswana declared Art. 164 (a)…
ANALYSIS Jan Maina 07 January 2022 The Kenyan Constitutional Civil Appeal Case of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission & 4 others v David Ndii & 82 others[2021] commonly referred to as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) judgement, certainly impacts the constitutional jurisprudence within Kenya and Africa at large[1]. By declaring a presidential constitutional amendment unconstitutional…
COMMENT Isabelle Zundel 23 December 2021 It’s international human rights month! For sure, this is a reason to celebrate the hard-fought advancements of the last decades as well as the resultant international legal framework that aims to promote and protect human rights all over the world. However, it also opens up the possibility to have…
ANALYSIS Ange-Dorine Irakoze 23 December 2021 Illicit financial flows (IFFs) are an international concern since they are inimical to the right to development provided in the UDHR, ICCPR and ICSECR. (1) Further, IFFs run afoul the spirit of the UN Declaration on the Right to Development 1986, 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and UN Sustainable…
ANALYSIS Lisa Strube 10 December 2021 In Rwanda, great progress has been made in recent years, especially in the area of gender discrimination policy. When it comes to land rights, however, gender discrimination still poses a problem. If we look at Rwandan land law, we realize that land ownership was predominantly reserved for men in…
ANALYSIS René Brosius 26 November 2021 Somalia is considered the prototype of a legally pluralistic environment. Nevertheless, the proper handling of legal diversity has not yet succeeded. While traditional finding of law remained essentially untouched during the colonial period, there have been various attempts to incorporate the Xeer and religious law into a state legal…
ANALYSIS René Brosius 12 November 2021 The latest news from Somalia could not be contradictory. On the one hand, the first democratic “one person, one vote” elections since 1969 took place in Puntland, the semi-autonomous state in north-eastern Somalia, on 25 October 2021; on the other hand, there was bloody fighting in central Somalia. Admittedly,…
COMMENT Lea Mwambene 12 November 2021 The motivation to publish academic work, requires discipline to ensure that the final output remains the ultimate goal. An invisible tension that often rattles or torments doctoral candidates, is publishing from their doctoral research studies as early career researchers. It is also conversely true that to some, it is…