Legalization of Human Rights in Africa: The Institutionalization of Laws Prohibiting State-sanctioned Violence and Torture

Most countries on the African continent have ratified or acceded to several human rights treaties, including the Torture Convention and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. This book assesses the progress African countries have made in institutionalizing human rights laws prohibiting torture, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances domestically.

States ratify human rights treaties for a variety of reasons. Some commentators defend an honest sincerity of purpose, whereas others might point to material incentives. The contributors to this volume go beyond the ratification puzzle to instead reframe legalization according to Lon Fuller’s conceptualization of congruence. Congruence is an interactive variable that measures the continuous efforts of government and the public to shape the law and its implementation. By reframing legalization as an ongoing process, the model created by the authors is used to test several hypotheses about what impacts legalization in Africa more broadly, and in countries such as Mali, Cameroon, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Tunisia, more specifically. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the legalization of human rights is never a finished product, but is a moving target influenced by exogenous and endogenous phenomena.

This volume is useful for researchers of genocide, human rights, and atrocity prevention, as well as for those interested in legalization and democratization both within Africa and other regions of the world.

Stacey M. Mitchell is an Associate Professor at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College, USA.

Veraline Nchotu is a Research Fellow at Northeastern Illinois University’s Genocide and Human Rights Research in Africa and the Diaspora Center, USA.

Lem Lilian Atanga is Associate Professor, Centre for Gender and African Studies, University of Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa