African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights Volume 1

Political, Intellectual & Cultural Origins
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-84701-353-8
Verlag: James Currey

Buch, Englisch, 682 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1180 g

Landmark study of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, one of the most important documents in modern African history, that positions it within the African Lives Matter struggle to assert an African identity rather than as simply a human rights document. Describes its underlying African origins and how the principles of the OAU influenced its path and content.

The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), which was proposed in 1979, adopted in 1981 and came into effect in 1986, was the first non-Western declaration of human rights and the first official statement of an African human rights perspective. With Africa largely absent in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted, it stands in stark historical reproach to the Western conception of universal human rights as a pivotal document in the decolonisation of the continent. This book, for the first time, presents a comprehensive account of the development of the ACHPR, which is key to a proper understanding of its fundamental nature. Through documenting its process of construction, it becomes possible to understand how Africans themselves understood the process and the issues involved and how the ACHPR became a political text asserted by African leaders and not a continuum of a so-called universal human rights tradition. The result is a radical repositioning of the underlying context of the ACHPR, one of the most important documents in modern African history, of how it came to be and how it should therefore be understood.

Volume 1 outlines the dominant African political and cultural ideas of the time and their symbiotic relationship with the principles and politics upon which the OAU (now African Union) was founded and upon which it functioned. It thereby draws out the path the ACHPR process was obliged to follow and the influence of the existential desire to counter neo-colonialism in all its forms that helped bring it into being and shaped its content.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rubner, Nat

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Menschenrechte, Bürgerrechte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Militärwesen Nationale und Internationale Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Afrikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik Außenpolitik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: The Emergence of African Discontent

Wartime propaganda in the British colonial territories
Wartime propaganda in the French colonial territories

The Atlantic Charter

PART ONE: THE ORIGINS OF THE ACHPR
Chapter 2: The Atlantic Charter and the Post-war Settlement

Africa and the Atlantic Charter
The UN Charter, UDHR and UNESCO - the post-war international settlement

Chapter 3: African Political and Economic Revanchism and the Emergence of the OAU

The emergence of the African Group at the UN
The creation of the OAU
The OAU polity

Chapter 4: African Intellectual and Cultural Revanchism - the Predicament of Black Disalienation
The universal Christian church in Africa
African literature, education and language
African socialism
Political rhetoric and the praxis of intellectual and cultural revanchism

PART TWO: The OAU and Human Rights
Chapter 5: The OAU Polity and the Domestic Praxis of Human Rights
British colonial territories
French colonial territories

North African colonial territories

Portuguese and Spanish colonial Territories

Chapter 6: The OAU Polity and the International Praxis of Human Rights
African states and the UDHR
The OAU and the CHR
The OAU and human rights at the UN beyond the CHR
African revanchist reinterpretation of the canons of universal human rights

The right to development and the prioritisation of human rights

Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Rubner, Nat
NAT RUBNER has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. He is an Honorary Research Fellow, School of History, Queen Mary, University of London. In the course of his previous 20-year career in international finance, he edited the first public international debt prospectus of the African Development Bank.