Judicial Independence and Transitional Justice in Cameroon: A Pathway to Sustainable Peace in the ongoing Anglophone Crisis
Posted: 10 May, 2023 Filed under: Bobuin Jr Valery Gemandze Oben | Tags: African Union’s Transitional Justice Policy, Anglophone crisis, Cameroon, conflict, constitutional enactment, constitutionalism, corruption, extrajudicial killings, inadequate resources, independence, judicial independence, OHCHR, orced disappearances, political interference, reconciliation, socio-economic transformation, sustainable peace, transformative constitutionalism, Transitional Justice 1 Comment
Author: Bobuin Jr Valery Gemandze Oben
Advocacy Specialist, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation
Introduction
Since 2017 Cameroon has been faced with a separatist insurrection widely referred to as—the Anglophone crisis. It has had devastating effects on the country, and over its bloody course, has been considered the most neglected conflict in the world, with thousands of lives lost and about a million others displaced. Transitional justice tools can provide a pathway for addressing the underlying causes of the conflict and promoting reconciliation and sustainable peace. The OHCHR defines it as, ‘‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past conflict, repression, violations and abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation’’. While in the African context, the African Union’s Transitional Justice Policy (AUTJP) defines it as ‘‘the various (formal and traditional or non-formal) policy measures and institutional mechanisms that societies, through an inclusive consultative process, adopt in order to overcome past violations, divisions and inequalities and to create conditions for both security and democratic and socio-economic transformation’’. However, as would be subsequently seen, the success of these measures is largely dependent on the independence of the judiciary.
To achieve transformation, Kenyan law needs to shun a hierarchy of sources
Posted: 17 August, 2015 Filed under: Humphrey Sipalla | Tags: constitutional law, dualism, echanistic jurisprudence, hierarchy of sources, ICCPR, ICJ, international law, ius cogens, Kenya, law enforcement, law reform, monism, transformation, transformative constitutionalism, Uhuru Park, use of force, Wangari Maathai 5 Comments
Author: Humphrey Sipalla
Freelance editor
It is opined by some in Kenya that the regime of former President Moi hardly broke constitutional law. For the most part, it rather, applying provisos and rigid compartmentalised thinking, bended and stretched it absurdly. There may be some truth to this. Previously on this platform, I opined that Kenyan society is prone to absolutes, in that instance, equating legitimate use of force with its disproportionate immoral use in “law enforcement”. It would seem that the legal fraternity too suffers its own peculiar version of this Kenyan tendency to be rigid.
At a conference on transformative constitutionalism, Prof. Ambreena Manji noted that for Kenya to realise the aims of its visionary transformative constitution, we needed a certain conversion of the soul, not just the mind, of the Kenyan jurist. At this same conference, the Chief Justice of Kenya, Dr Willy Mutunga lamented the old judiciary’s reliance of “mechanistic jurisprudence”. Such judicial policy led to the dismissal of the late Wangari Maathai’s (later Nobel Peace Prize Laureate) 1989 case against government plans to build a 60 storey building on Nairobi’s Uhuru Park as she did not show what injury would befall her were the environment to be spoilt. In 1989 too, the High Court held that the Bill of Rights could not be enforced as the Chief Justice had not issued enforcement rules as obligated by the Constitution. In 1993, again, presidential candidate, Kenneth Matiba’s election petition ground to a halt as he was unable to serve the sitting president with suit papers personally.
AfricLaw 