Between 2000 and 2015, women ascended to the top of judiciaries across Africa, most notably as chief justices of supreme courts in common law countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia, but also as presidents of constitutional courts in civil law countries such as Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Niger and Senegal. Most of these appointments was a "first" in terms of the gender of the chief justice. At the same time, women are being appointed in record numbers as magistrates, judges and justices across the continent. While women’s increasing numbers and roles in African executives and legislatures have been addressed in a burgeoning scholarly literature, very little work has focused on women in judiciaries. This book addresses the important issue of the increasing numbers and varied roles of women judges and justices, as judiciaries evolve across the continent. Scholars of law, gender politics and African politics provide overviews of recent developments in gender and the judiciary in nine African countries that represent north, east, southern and west Africa as well as a range of colonial experiences, postcolonial trajectories and legal systems, including mixes of common, civil, customary, or sharia law. In the process, each chapter seeks to address the following questions: What has been the historical experience of the judicial system in a given country, from before colonialism until the present? What is the current court structure and where are the women judges, justices, magistrates and other women located? What are the selection or appointment processes for joining the bench and in what ways may these help or hinder women to gain access to the courts as judges and justices? Once they become judges, do women on the bench promote the rights of women through their judicial powers? What are the challenges and obstacles facing women judges and justices in Africa? Timely and relevant in this era in which governmental accountability and transparency are essential to the consolidation of democracy in Africa and when women are accessing significant leadership positions across the continent, this book considers the substantive and symbolic representation of women’s interests by women judges and the wider implications of their presence for changing institutional norms and advancing the rule of law and human rights.

A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has run into serious problems with its first big case -- the situation in northern Uganda. There is no doubt that appalling crimes have occurred here. Over a million people have been forced to live in overcrowded displacement camps under the control of the Ugandan army. Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has abducted thousands, many of them children and has systematically tortured, raped, maimed and killed. Nevertheless, the ICC has confronted outright hostility from a wide range of groups, including traditional leaders, representatives of the Christian Churches and non-governmental organizations. Even the Ugandan government, which invited the court to become involved, has been expressing serious reservations. Tim Allen assesses the controversy. While recognizing the difficulties involved, he shows that much of the antipathy towards the ICC's intervention is misplaced. He also draws out important wider implications of what has happened. Criminal justice sets limits to compromise and undermines established procedures of negotiation with perpetrators of violence. Events in Uganda have far reaching implications for other war zones - and not only in Africa. Amnesties and peace talks may never be quite the same again.

Lack of diversity within the judiciary has been identified as a legitimacy concern in domestic settings, and the last few years have seen increasing attention to this question at the international level. This book analyses the implications of identity and diversity across numerous international adjudicatory bodies.

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.

This volume analyses the prospects and challenges of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights in context. The book is for all readers interested in African institutions and contemporary global challenges of peace, security, human rights, and international law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book offers the first comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the provisions of the ‘Malabo Protocol’—the amendment protocol to the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights—adopted by the African Union at its 2014 Summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. The Annex to the protocol, once it has received the required number of ratifications, will create a new Section in the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights with jurisdiction over international and transnational crimes, hence an ‘African Criminal Court’. In this book, leading experts in the field of international criminal law analyze the main provisions of the Annex to the Malabo Protocol. The book provides an essential and topical source of information for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of international criminal law, and for all readers with an interest in political science and African studies. Gerhard Werle is Professor of German and Internationa l Crimina l Law, Criminal Procedure and Modern Legal History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Director of the South African-German Centre for Transnational Criminal Justice. In addition, he is an Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape and Honorary Professor at North-West University of Political Science and Law (Xi’an, China). Moritz Vormbaum received his doctoral degree in criminal law from the University of Münster (Germany) and his postdoctoral degree from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is a Senior Researcher at Humboldt-Universität, as well as a coordinator and lecturer at the South African-German Centre for Transnational Criminal Justice.