Obiora Chinedu Okafor

York University · Osgoode Hall Law School

This paper focuses on significant patterns/features in the historical development of the international law of secession and its contribution over time (or the lack thereof) to the struggle to afford greater protection to oppressed substate groups the world over. It was Crawford Young who once observed that “the state as an analytical quarry is an e...

The major objective of this article is to examine the extent to which the human rights jurisprudence of the Nigerian appellate courts has been sensitive and / or receptive to the socio-economic and political claims of Nigeria's large population of the poor and marginalized. In particular, the article considers: the extent to which Nigerian human ri...

The roles that Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars could play in political and/or socio-economic struggles beyond the academy, and the relationships of these scholars to politicians, diplomats activists, civil servants, peasant movements, civil society, and other nonacademic actors are issues as important to TWAIL as they a...

This article examines the extent to which the jurisprudence of the Nigerian appellate courts has expanded, maintained or contracted the opportunities of the poor for exercising as robustly as possible their own 'agency' to act to redress human rights abuses committed against them during the period between 1990 and 2011. In doing so, the article mos...

Much scholarly writing on the International Criminal Court (ICC) gives the impression that the Court can function effectively as a primary transitional justice mechanism in Africa, and that it should, indeed, be deployed more or less frequently, liberally and robustly as such. But to what extent can this manner and degree of utilization of the ICC...

That power (be it of the military, economic, political, social or ideational kind) can markedly affect the nature and orientation of international norms and praxis is so well accepted a proposition that an attempt to adumbrate and justify it should not detain us. What can often require explanation are the specific ways in which this phenomenon a...

This article deals with the question whether the jurisprudence of Nigeria’s appellate courts has helped advance or impede the struggles of the poor to assert their human rights in the country. The article begins by defining, delimiting, and situating the concepts “struggle” and “human rights as struggle.” It then moves on to identify and discuss th...

"External involvement with the processes of state formation, particularly in the Third World, has been present for a long time ...However, categorisation as a distinct variant of state formation appears justified, given the extent to which various forms of external, that is, international preoccupation with the internal policy frameworks and the st...

Drawing upon the important insight of critical human rights scholars that 'pro-human rights' are not necessarily 'pro-poor', this article mainly utilises Baxi's germinal thesis on the emergence of a trade-related market-friendly human rights (TREMF) paradigm (that is slowly but surely displacing what he refers to as the UDHR paradigm, much to the a...

It is particularly meet, on the thirtieth anniversary of the adoption of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, to re-examine the ways in which its group rights provisions has been interpreted and applied. What is the concept of group rights that animates the “peoples’ rights” provisions in the African Charter? How have these group right...

This article analyzes the record of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria with respect to the prosecution of the corrupt practices in Nigeria of foreign actors (individuals and corporations). The article seeks to extract from the analyses possibilities and implications for effective anti-corruption efforts in other parts of Africa...

Between 1999 and 2007, a popular Labour-led movement led a pro-poor struggle to resist the fuel price hike policy of the Nigerian government. Waged in the context of the poverty in which nearly 70 per cent of Nigerians lived, the operation of powerful incentives to raise fuel prices, and Labour's extraordinary socio-political leverage, these strugg...

The objective of the article is to assess some of the sub-claims that emerge from Baxi’s thesis on an emergent trade-related market-friendly human rights paradigm in the light of the available evidence regarding the intense contestations and confrontations that have occurred between Nigeria’s politically and economically transitional Obasanjo reg...

This article enquires into the likely posture of future international law with respect to African peoples. It does so by focusing on three of the most important issues that have defined, and are likely to continue to define, international law’s engagement with Africans. These are: the grinding poverty in which most Africans live, the question of ag...

During the Fall of 2007, as part of a much broader York-Nigerian Universities linkage project that he had been working on for some time, Professor Okafor taught an internationalized version of a pre-existing existing course entitled “Human Rights in Africa.” At the same time, Professor Dakas of the Faculty of Law, University of Jos, Nigeria (assist...

During 1999–2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it r...

The scourge of illegitimate governance in its many forms is, and always has been, globally endemic, constituting, in a contemporary sense, the single most important impoverishing and destabilising element in our 'global neighbourhood'. 1 If, in the view of nations, the major mandates of the law and common institutions of nations, as expressed in th...

Between 1999 and 2007, a broad-based labour-led movement which focused most of its energies on its struggle against unpopular fuel price hikes in Nigeria was able to exert considerable, though limited, influence on an Obasanjo-led executive arm of government that was at best quasidemocratic in its orientation. This article argues that, despite the...

This paper engages with the question of whether TWAIL is a theory, a methodology, or both. It takes the mainstream positivist understandings of the concepts of "theory" and "methodology" seriously in order to assess TWAIL scholarship against those (admittedly contingent) measures. It argues that TWAIL offers both theories of, and methodologies for,...

The proposed paper will examine the deep structure, appropriateness and soundness of the reasoning and outcome in the Bakassi Case decided a few years ago by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The proposed paper will examine the extent to which the decision reproduces the colonial logic and discourse which, as Anghie has convincingly demonst...

Caught between pressure from dominant global economic actors (such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and certain states) to implement painful socio-economic reform measures, and pressure from significant numbers of their own peoples to reject these IMF/WB-style prescriptions, formally democratic “third world” government...

Eds), The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2003). 1 The word "recolonisation" is being inter alia used to indicate first, the reconstitution of the relationship between State and international law so as to undermine the autonomy of third world States and to the dis-advantage of its p...

African Studies Review 49.1 (2006) 173-174 Written by a respected and prolific scholarly commentator, Human Rights in Africa is an important and worthy addition to the currently sparse but growing literature on the institutions concerned with the promotion and protection of human rights on the African continent. Given the recent inauguration of the...

Both the conceptualization and practice of international human rights education within the mainstream human rights community has been shaped and framed, with mostly negative consequences, by at least three constitutive orthodoxies: a heaven-hell binary distinction between an all-but-perfect West and an all-but-hellish Third World; a consequent unid...

Human Rights Quarterly 24.3 (2002) 662-720 Jack Donnelly Obinna Okere Upendra Baxi It is increasingly being recognized in the relevant literature that, important as they obviously are, international institutions cannot in themselves suffice as the primary sites of the struggle(s) for human rights. Concomitantly, it has become as apparent that these...

We can only speak to these critical events ... as they unfold before our own eyes, from our own unhappy situatedness; the Clio's couch, the disengagement that only distance may bring, is not for us the gift of time. We have to struggle, as best we can, to make sense of current developments, amidst ever menacing forms of infliction of traumatic huma...

The special theme of this volume of the Yearbook, i.e. "Reflections on Some Forms of Statehood in Africa," invites contributor and reader alike to grapple with an abstract concept that has nevertheless proved to be highly consequential to the lived experience of virtually every African - at least since the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the increa...

This article is devoted to the highly important task of mapping, contextualizing and highlighting the significance ofsome of the modest achievements that have been made by domestic human rights NGOs in Nigeria.! As limited as the development of these NGOs into much more popular (and therefore more influential) movements has tended to be, they have...

This article examines the influence that IHIs (such as the African System on Human and Peoples' Rights) can exert within states, with the facilitative work of local popular forces, and relates that to the possibility of valuable IHI contributions to peacebuilding within deeply fragmented African states. Of all the existing approaches to the study o...

A new factor has recently reemerged: financial transfers from South to North. Reemerged, for it was also a common occurrence in earlier colonial periods. — Ivan Leigh Head Written over fifteen years ago by Ivan Leigh Head, a highly distinguished Canadian international lawyer, foreign policy expert, and international development thinker, the words...

That the international refugee protection system, and the set of legal norms that underpin it, currently face an extremely serious challenge to their effectiveness (stemming mostly from the attitudes and actions of the more powerful refugee-receiving countries of the world), is now widely acknowledged in the extant literature.2 One very important e...

This article critically analyses the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Suresh case, especially with regard to its underlying basis in doctrine and policy, and its implications for the non-refoulement norm. The principal conclusions of this article are as follows. In the first place, laudable as it mostly is, the Suresh decision is base...

In 1996, the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights issued its now famous decision in Katangese Peoples' Congress v. Zaire. About two years later, in 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its equally famous decision in Reference Re Secession of Quebec. Both decisions addressed crucial and highly controversial questions regarding the righ...

La existencia de afectación metastásica de la laringe es rara. Se han descrito unos 150 casos en la literatura. En tan sólo 8 casos, el tumor primario se trataba de un adenocarcinoma de colon. Presentamos el caso de una paciente de 80 años, con antecedente de adenocarcinoma coloide de colon tratado 7 años antes, remitida por disnea crónica y progre...

Metastatic involvement of the laryngeal is very rare, with around 150 cases reported to the literature. In eight of these cases, the primary tumor was a colon adenocarcinoma. We report the case of a 80 year-old woman treated of a colloid adenocarcinoma of 7 years earlier, referred to us for chronic and progressive dyspnea. Endoscopic examination sh...

At the World Conference on Human Rights in June 1993 the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action was adopted by the representatives of 171 states.! During the ten days of the Conference intense debate and negotiation resulted in a number of profound gains for human rights advocates in the United Nations. Of these, two will have far-reaching cons...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of British Columbia, 1998. Includes bibliographical references.

In a recent ruling, a Nigerian High Court ordered that proceedings brought before the court, by a student who was aggrieved by his impeachment from the position of President of the Students' Union of the, University of Nigeria, be stayed pending the determination of the dispute by the Judicial Council of the Union. This article considers the legal...

The struggle of Nigerian civil society for the establishment of a democratic polity, founded on the rule of law and the respect for the human and peoples' rights of ordinary citizens of Nigeria, has been waged against the military governments that have ruled by force for the better part of its nearly three and a half decades of independent existenc...

If, as Professor Thomas Franck has convincingly argued, the most important question facing contemporary international lawyers is not "is international law, law?" but "is international law fair?" then the very debatable questions of the desirability, content, existence and effect of an international legal right of poor peoples to development deserve...

This collection of essays explores different dimensions of the relationship between the third world and international law. The topics covered include third world approaches to international law, non-state actors and developing countries, feminism and the third world, foreign investment, resistance and international law, and territorial disputes and...

The continuing encounter among the peoples who now generally tend to self-identify as "third world" and the set of norms and discourses that we refer to as "international law" has had a long, contested and complicated-if in the end, mostly problematic-history. Over three generations of the scholars who have self-identified as "third world" have sou...

It is now increasingly acknowledged amongst both scholars and practitioners of international law that the international legal system posits a body of norms which constitute a collective barometer. This measure is useful in the evaluation of the legitimacy of governments and of governance. As the author has argued elsewhere, this barometer consists...