Brief Description
Detailed case studies of the African human rights system operating within Nigeria and South Africa.
Learn More about the Book
This 2007 book draws from and builds upon many of the more traditional approaches to the study of international human rights institutions (IHIs), especially quasi-constructivism. The author reveals some of the ways in which many such domestic deployments of the African system have been brokered or facilitated by local activist forces, such as human rights NGOs, labour unions, women's groups, independent journalists, dissident politicians, and activist judges. In the end, the book exposes and reflects upon the inherent inability of the dominant compliance-focused model to adequately capture the range of other ways - apart from via state compliance - in which the domestic invocation of IHIs like the African system can contribute - albeit to a modest extent - to the pro-human rights alterations that can sometimes occur in the self-understandings, conceptions of interest or senses of appropriateness held within key domestic institutions within states.
About the Author
Professor Okafor joined Osgoode Hall Law School after holding faculty positions at the University of Nigeria and Carleton University. He has served as an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School's human rights program; as a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar at the MIT program on human rights and justice; and as an expert panellist for the then United Nations Commission on Human Rights' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. His doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia received the Governor General's Gold Medal (the prize for best doctoral dissertation university-wide). He also received Osgoode's Teaching Excellence Award in 2002. He is currently working on a funded study relating to human rights activism by the labor movement in Nigeria, as well as on a major project examining the character of refugee law/refugeehood post 9/11. Professor Okafor has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law and refugee law, as well as general public international law. Aside from this volume, he has also written or co-edited 5 other books and over 40 articles and papers.
Review Quotes
1. Review of the hardback: 'Okafor's style and ease of analysis of technically academic issues efficiently bring to light possibilities that would enhance pre-existing approaches to the study of IHIs. For those interested in the analysis of the African Human Rights System and a fresh voice in the IHI discourse, this book serves as useful background information as well as an excellent example of unconventional thinking.' Verfassung und Recht in Ubersee"
