Abstract
In an era in which doubt has been cast over the international legal discipline’s internationalist credentials, scholarship which addresses alternative perceptions and conceptions of international law in the non-West deserves our full attention. In this context, we welcome Lilian Chenwi and Takele Soboka Bulto’s collection on ‘Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations from an African Perspective’, which highlights the destructive human rights impacts of states’ acts, decisions, and omissions outside their territory, and makes a convincing doctrinal case that extraterritorial obligations (ETOs) can legally be based on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR). This is a carefully edited collection which forms a coherent whole. The individual contributions are well-written and contain a wealth of doctrinal insights and empirical information. The editors and contributors deserve particular credit for highlighting the ETO potential of the ACHPR, the refined reasoning of the African Commission (largely unknown outside Africa), and the extant and potential interactions between the African human rights system and other regional or universal systems. The voices of the new generation of African (and Africa-minded) scholars who have contributed to this volume deserve a wide audience.
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Notes
- 1.
See for a critique: Roberts (2017).
- 2.
ACHPR, SERAC v Nigeria, Communication No 155/96 (2001) AHRLR 60, paras. 45–47.
- 3.
These articles provide that the Commission shall draw inspiration from other instruments (provided that African Charter parties are also parties to these instruments), and ‘shall also take into consideration, as subsidiary measures to determine the principles of law’, inter alia, ‘legal precedents and doctrine’.
- 4.
The emphasis in this provision on international cooperation, in conjunction with the aforementioned absence of a limiting jurisdictional clause, has indeed been construed as grounding ETOs. See more at length: Langford et al. (2013).
- 5.
Compare Agulanna (2010), p. 296 (arguing that ‘while in the Nazi and Stalinist societies the life of the individual only added instrumental value in the sense that people were seen as tools to be used and discarded, in Africa, the life of the individual is seen as possessing great value and worth’—although proceeding to state that ‘in Africa that the individual can only be defined by reference to the environing community’).
- 6.
- 7.
Verve Search, a London-based agency, has developed an interesting quiz for the BBC on the discrepancy between one’s nation of birth and one’s true home (‘When it comes to your personality, your nation of birth may not be your true home. Where in the world are people most like you?’). See http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180409-whats-your-secret-nationality (last consulted on 16 July 2018). The author, who is Belgian by birth, lives in the Netherlands, and has never lived in Africa, participated in the quiz and was quite surprised to find out that his true home is … Ethiopia!.
- 8.
See, e.g., Langford et al. (2013).
- 9.
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2017). See Part C on extraterritorial obligations.
- 10.
ACHPR, Communication No. 157/96, (2003) AHRLR 111.
- 11.
ACHPR, Democratic Republic of Congo v Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, Communication No. 227/1999, (2004) AHRLR 19.
- 12.
ECtHR, Al-Skeini and Others v The United Kingdom, Judgment, (2011) App. No. 55721/07).
- 13.
International Commission of Jurists (2011), p. 3. On closer inspection, this acceptance may not be that surprising, as the first editor of the collection was one of the expert signatories of the Maastricht Principles.
- 14.
Maastricht Principles, para. 9.
- 15.
Maastricht Principles, para. 24.
- 16.
Methven O’Brien (2018), pp. 47–73, 72.
- 17.
Id.
- 18.
See on TWAIL, e.g., Gathii (2011), pp. 26–48.
- 19.
Maastricht Principles, para. 8(a).
- 20.
Obviously, to the extent that foreign states exercise effective territorial or personal control to the exclusion of the territorial state, e.g., in situations of occupation, these foreign states will have primary human rights obligations.
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Ryngaert, C. (2019). L. Chenwi and T. Soboka Bulta (eds.): Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations from an African Perspective. In: Yihdego, Z., Desta, M., Hailu, M. (eds) Ethiopian Yearbook of International Law 2018. Ethiopian Yearbook of International Law, vol 2018. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24078-3_10
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