International Justice in Africa: Innovative Approaches to Localizing the Global

When discussions about international law and justice in Africa arise, the narrative is generally predictable. Africa is commonly characterized as a continent that is unable to meet international standards in this domain and thus requires intervention from the outside to insure accountability for serious crimes and the protection of human rights. Commentary on the relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its African member states tends to exemplify this narrative (Kabamba). This paper will argue that the African continent should instead be seen as the source of many innovative strategies for applying globally accepted legal principles at the local level. This can be seen in the domain of international criminal justice, where local cultural and linguistic practices and understandings have led both the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Combs; Eltringham; Swigart) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Anders; Jalloh; Kelsall; Shaw; Swigart) – with the input of African staff and legal practitioners – to rethink common procedures for investigations, testimony, and outreach. The need to accommodate African realities, as well as persons connected to trials, is now similarly shaping the practices of the ICC in significant ways (Clarke; Stahn; STIC; Swigart). The Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC), based in Dakar, is also notable as the first so‐called “hybrid” criminal tribunal to exercise a form of universal jurisdiction over high‐ranking defendants charged with crimes of mass atrocity who have no link to the host state (Chambres Africaines Extraordinaires; van Schaack). The EAC thereby challenges the notion that the prosecution of African leaders can only be successfully mounted in The Hague. Such innovation is not limited to international criminal justice, however. The African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights takes into consideration not only the regional African Charter for Human and Peoples' Rights but also applies any other international human rights instrument that is relevant to the cases before it (Ouguergouz). In this way, it has taken on a much broader mandate than its counterpart human rights courts in Europe and the Americas, whose subject matter jurisdictions are confined to their respective regional human rights conventions. Furthermore, courts of regional integration on the African continent, namely the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (Alter et. al.) and the East African Court of Justice (Gathii), are expanding the boundaries of their jurisdictions by increasingly taking on human rights violations, including those related to slavery, equal protection before the law, and freedom of expression. This paper contends that such exceptional judicial configurations, practices and interpretations should be recognized internationally for what they are – expressions of a significant consensus on the part of African legal practitioners, jurists, and activists – if not always the authorities – about the need to protect fundamental human rights and challenge impunity on the African continent. These innovative approaches can serve as both an illustration of, and basis for a shifting narrative about, local African commitment vis‐à‐vis globally accepted standards of justice, as well as a continent‐based model for future progress in this domain.