Abstract This article examines the role cultural artefacts can play in counteracting the systemic erasure of non-European ideational iterations in international law. Cultural artefacts, in both physical and digital/pictorial forms, are valuable tools for enhancing learners’ cognitive abilities. In the context of international law, cultural artefacts can elicit the critique of hegemonic discourses, emphasising the imperative of engaging other disciplines in addressing critical issues, and encouraging the development of new terminologies for expanding the ideational parameters of the discipline. In order to achieve these lofty goals, international law teachers must be intentional about identifying the relevant artefacts and incorporating them into learning activities that equip learners with critical intellectual capacities. Such engagement not only centres learners’ cultural worldview in the learning environment but also makes them active thought leaders and change agents.

Abstract Police brutality is a pervasive problem that impedes human rights in many societies. In Nigeria, the level of police brutality is alarmingly high, leaving citizens in fear of contact with the police. Beyond colonial legacies, factors such as poor funding and training, lack of accountability mechanisms, and inadequate punitive measures sustain the persistence of police brutality. This study interrogates the use of excessive force by Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad ( SARS ), which restricts public civic space and violates human rights. Using a qualitative methodology, and drawing from primary data collected from Amnesty International reports and interviews with key informants such as security agents, legal practitioners, and ordinary citizens, including victims of SARS brutality, the study highlights human rights abuses by the SARS . The findings indicate that SARS has conspicuously deviated from its original duty of combating crime to perpetrating and abetting crime and violence against the public, particularly Nigerian youth. This situation urgently demands redress.

Abstract This article critically examines the persistence of property grabbing under South Africa’s customary law of succession, despite landmark legal reforms such as the judgment in Bhe v Magistrate, Khayelitsha; Shibi v Sithole 2005 (1) SA 580 (CC) and the Reform of Customary Law of Succession and Regulation of Related Matters Act 11 of 2009. Drawing on desktop research and empirical findings, the article explores key risk factors, including gender, the nature of the estate, the type of marriage, and the urban-rural divide, that exacerbate the vulnerability to property grabbing. The analysis reveals that legislative reforms alone are insufficient to secure inheritance rights, and calls for a holistic approach that includes strengthening matrimonial property rights, promoting legal literacy, community education, and enhancing oversight of estate administration. The findings underscore the limitations of current reforms in addressing systemic inequities and offer critical insights into the socio-legal challenges of balancing statutory and customary practices.

Abstract Many low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rolling out digital ID programmes, where the state makes a digital record of a person’s identity, for use in identification and data based decision making. Digital ID programmes have been contested on technical and political grounds. Political issues, such as the potential of digital ID to exclude, discriminate and deny services to certain groups of people, as well as the surveillance capabilities of digital ID data in the hands of national security officers, are more difficult to resolve. This article uses Kenya’s legal history to trace the politics of identity practices, particularly during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The long experiences with identity registration and use in Kenya provides important lessons for many LMICs implementing digital ID for general population registration and social welfare programmes. The article connects three main issues that have been at the core of digital ID contestations - inclusion, digital welfare and power using social justice theory. Using the lenses of social inclusion, social minimums and social power, the paper finds that the unjust colonial origins of Kenya’s registration laws still linger in present laws and practices. As such, digitalisation of identity practices would further marginalise groups that are underrepresented in registration.

Abstract Despite multilateral global efforts to improve biodiversity conservation, the African biodiversity range is increasingly facing existential threats. The Red List of Threatened Species (RLTS) adopted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to protect relevant species is not effectively implemented in many African countries. In this study, we identify the legal mechanisms to protect biodiversity at regional and national levels, focusing specifically on Liberia and Nigeria. We also identify the specific drivers of biodiversity loss in sub-Saharan Africa as a framework for formulating context-specific laws. The study highlights the importance of prioritising legislative action reflecting the IUCN’s red list of threatened species and the need to develop local solutions to more contextual challenges. The added relevance of creating specialised agencies to address the crisis of biodiversity loss is also discussed.

Abstract For the first time in Tanzania’s constitutional law jurisprudence, the court delivered judgment against the President on 5 December 2022. The decision was revolutionary as it opened the door for suits to be instituted directly against the President. Despite its jurisprudential significance, the utility of this judgment is washed away by some legal dilemmas that the Court left unaddressed. This case note highlights those dilemmas and their implications.

Abstract On 18 November, 2010 a preliminary examination of the situation in Nigeria was announced and for almost a decade, investigation has not yet begun. Ten potential cases have been identified, seven for Boko Haram and three for Nigerian Security Forces (NSF). This article investigates whether issues of complementarity and admissibility provide any legal barriers capable of withholding investigation; and whether granting national amnesty to Boko Haram can hinder investigation and prosecution by the International Criminal Court. It employs a qualitative methodological approach for investigation and evaluation regarding the issues discussed. It argues that the situation in Nigeria has met the entire legal framework for investigation and prosecution to proceed and that the arrest of Abubakar Shekau, Abu Musab AlBarnawi, and Abu Abdullahi Ibn Umar al-Barnawi, the Boko Haram leaders will weaken the group, and provide the needed external help and intervention desired to end the terrorism.

Abstract This article calls for the location of victimhood rather than political convenience at the centre of Zimbabwe’s peace-building matrix. From the attainment of independence in 1980 to the military assisted end of President Robert Mugabe’s rule in November 2017, Zimbabwe’s episodic cycles of violence were concluded through elite bargained amnesty ordinances, state mediated reconciliation pronouncements and clemency orders that unconditionally benefitted perpetrators at the expense of victims. The forgive-and-forget ethic central to these routine and fractional peace building measures, I argue, not only disregarded the rule of law but negated victimhood and rendered justice divisible. Victims of politically motivated violence could not secure redress through the courts of law against amnestied perpetrators as this would amount to double jeopardy. The government withheld prosecutorial justice against perpetrators and disregarded reparations for victims. Within the national legislative framework ordinary legislators could not move motions compelling the government to compensate survivors of violence because only the vice-presidents and ministers could move motions that had the consequence of either depleting state revenues or causing the imposition of additional taxes on citizens. Considering that ministers who had the prerogative to move such motions served in cabinet at the behest of their intractable president they could hardly embarrass or contradict their principal. Essentially, the Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwean government established legal firewalls for perpetrators of politically motivated violence which ipso facto invalidated the quest for justice by victims of the country’s ever recurring cycles of violence. This authoritarian legalism disregarded victimhood and emboldened human rights violators.

Abstract This paper examines the reasons for and consequences of the resort to traditional spiritual justice in spite of increasing awareness of state civil law structures. The paper helps us theorise on how economic disputes resulting from lack of effective legal enforcement yields itself easily to the deployment of spiritual justice. The significance of this study is that it contributes perspectives into issues of law and political modernisation and their interrelationships with religious imaginations. It departs from previous accounts that focus on the pervasiveness of religion in the contemporary Ghanaian public sphere. Instead, the current study devotes attention to the conditions that occasion the deployment of religion in the public domain.

Abstract Post-colonial Africa has been caught in military coups and civil wars. Incumbent leaders have refused to step down and hand over power post-elections or amended the constitution to not get voted out of power. In this context, three main challenges to democracy in Africa are military coups, lack of free and fair elections and illegal constitutional amendments to entrench de facto monarchy. To combat this, the Malabo Protocol, which introduces criminal jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights, criminalises unconstitutional change of government (‘UCG’). The article outlines the progression of UCG from a violation of the democracy and rule of law principles under the African Charter to a prosecutable crime under the Malabo Protocol and analyses the difficulties an actual prosecution will face on account of vague definition, lack of international recognition and the major roadblock due to Heads of State immunity under the Protocol.