This book provides readers with the knowledge necessary to fully understand how international law carved the history and life of Namibia. It observes that Namibia has benefited from and contributed to international law in a way that shaped that country’s political and socio-economic development and to an extent that few other countries experienced. For many a year since Namibia achieved Independence on 21 March 1990 and established the Faculty of Law at the University of Namibia in 1992, students and lecturers have relied on materials from South Africa, despite the fact that Namibian law has since then grown apart from its South African heritage. It is high time for lecturers and students in Namibia to teach and learn with a textbook that analyses international law from the distinct standpoint of Namibia and that views the nation’s legal interactions with other states through its own prism! And this textbook aims to do just that. Through its 19 chapters, this book informs readers about international law, its sources, international treaties, Namibian statehood, dispute resolution, the use of force, human rights, Namibia’s economic relations with the outside world (including the Southern African Customs Union), and the law of the sea. Namibian courts have in their own way followed the rules of international law scrupulously, but – as this book shows – international law nonetheless remains the source of Namibian law that lawyers apply the least. Accordingly, this book underlines the significance, the practical utility, and the relevance of international law in the unique Namibian context.

This title was first published in 2001. This text critically examines the role and relevance of international human rights law in the process of protection, especially in the cases of Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. It argues that international human rights law does have a role to play in the protection and, indeed the enforcement of human rights in these countries and that there is an emerging trend to that effect.

This book presents policymakers and scholars with an over-arching analytical model of international law, one that demonstrates the potential of international law, but also explains how policymakers should choose among different international legal structures.

Exchange of goods and ideas among nations, cross-border pollution, global warming, and international crime pose formidable questions for international law. Two respected scholars provide an intellectual framework for assessing these problems from a rational choice perspective and describe conditions under which international law succeeds or fails.

This unique book brings together leading experts from diverse areas of public international law to offer a comprehensive overview of the approaches to evolutionary interpretation in different international legal regimes. It begins by asking what interpretation is, offering the views of expert authors on the question, its components and definitions. It then comments on situations that have called for evolutionary interpretation in different international legal regimes, including general international law, environmental law, human rights law, EU law, investment law, international trade law, and how domestic courts have, on occasions, interpreted treaties and other international legal instruments in an evolutionary manner. This timely, authoritative compendium offers an in-depth understanding of the processes at work in evolutionary interpretation as well as a prime selection of the current trends and future challenges.

This book focuses on the constitutional developments in Namibia since 1990. It begins with an account of Namibia's struggle for self-determination that serves to put the Namibian constitution in context and then proceeds to consider the principal features of the Namibian constitution, the organs of state and the fundamental principles that provide a framework for the effective functioning of a democratic state. It goes on to examine in depth the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights and freedoms protected by the Declaration of Rights, analysing the relevant jurisprudence of the Namibian courts in the light of international human rights law.