Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Development in Africa (review0

The public profile of human rights in Africa has risen considerably in the two decades since the adoption of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights in June 1981. All fifty-three members of the African Union, the successor to the Organization of African Unity under whose aegis the African Charter was adopted, have ratified or acceded to it. Most of these states have incorporated human rights provisions or bills of rights in their constitutions and established national institutions and mechanisms, such as human rights commissions, to ensure effective promotion and protection of human rights at the domestic level.

Moreover, the last couple of years alone years have witnessed a veritable expansion in the normative and institutional architecture of the African regional human rights system. This period has seen several important developments, such as: the inauguration of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the African Child, established under the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child of 1990; the entry into force of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights of 1998; the adoption by the Assembly of the African Union, on 11 July 2003, of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa and the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption. Involvement in human rights work by individuals—such as scholars, advocates, campaigners and activists—and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) over the last two decades has also increased several-fold over this period. In brief, contrary to popular belief, there is a panoply of laws and institutions dealing with human rights in Africa today, and the human rights narrative is now firmly part of modern African political discourse and praxis.

The collection of essays presented in this book offers an original and significant contribution to the discourse on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in Africa. Although there have been other publications on this subject, and there is now a large body of literature on human rights in Africa in general, this book presents a welcome opportunity to rethink the issues afresh through the analytical lenses of a (mostly) new generation of human rights scholars, human rights workers, and practitioners drawn from a variety of disciplines: history, political science, linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology and law. The contributors, all specialists in their areas of expertise, offer panoramic yet succinctly argued accounts of the various issues. Each of the contributors offers their own, original contribution to the vexing and complex debates surrounding the concepts of universalism and relativism in human rights, the meaning and content of the concepts of democracy and the rule of law, and the practical relevance and political implications of these concepts in the context of discourses about development, globalization and the role of civil society and NGOs in the democratization process.

The major strength of the book lies in the relevance of the chosen themes for the contemporary debates on human rights, democratization, and globalization in Africa. The overall message of the book is a plea for a holistic view of human rights. This message is well encapsulated in Zeleza's Introduction, where he writes:

Thus neither the North nor the South, the developed nor the developing worlds can claim to be on the side of angels where human rights are concerned. Yet, ethnocentrism continues in human rights discourse about conceptualization, constitution and contextualization of human rights. A more holistic global regime of human rights would have to encompass all the so-called three generation of [rights]. The growing list of rights [is] itself a reflection of [the] emergence of an increasingly universal human rights regime as more and more societies and social constituencies, hitherto excluded from human rights claims, make their demands for inclusion.¹

Zeleza cogently argues...