Strathmore Law Journal
Not a member yet
98 research outputs found
Sort by
Constitution-Making from the Middle: Civil Society and Transition Politics in Kenya, 1992-1997, Second Edition, by Willy Mutunga
Get PDFA Critique of the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone’s Conviction of Augustine Marrah for Criminal Contempt
Get PDFThe Legal Practitioners Act of 2000 authorises the Sierra Leone Bar Association to elect six legal practitioners for membership of the General Legal Council (Council), which is the regulatory body of the legal profession in Sierra Leone. In April 2019, Ibrahim Sorie was among the legal practitioners elected to the Council. Subsequently, I—another legal practitioner—objected to and petitioned in the High Court of Sierra Leone Sorie’s election to the Council on the basis of ineligibility.
The thrust of my objection was that Sorie, a two-term ex-president of the Sierra Leone Bar Association had not yet attained the necessary fifteen-year standing qualification at the date of his appointment to the Council, based on his year of enrolment into the Permanent Register or Roll of Court in 2011.
Sorie filed an action in the Supreme Court against the Council invoking the exclusive original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to interpret certain portions of the Constitution of Sierra Leone vis-à-vis the eligibility provision for membership to the Council in the Legal Practitioners Act.2 The Supreme Court delivered a controversial 97-paged judgment on 27 October 2020
Devolution as a Panacea to Deeply Divided Multi-Ethnic (National) States: The Continuing Kenyan Experiment
Get PDFThe multiple designers of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution intended that devolution should address the many years of economic exclusion that many Kenyan communities had suffered. While this paper concedes that the design of the 2010 Constitution to a large extent achieves this role, the same constitution fails at engendering national multi-ethnic unity. This paper uses three broad approaches to assess Kenya’s devolution experiment under Kenya’s 2010 Constitution and ethnic unity: the first is Daniel Posner’s Institutional Politics approach, the second is Donald Horowitz’s Constitutional Ethnic Federalism approach, and the final one is Yash Pal Ghai’s Constitutional Autonomy approach. The author argues that limiting our focus to these three approaches as applied in this paper, there is no constitutional design that can easily achieve the lofty objective of national multi-ethnic unity in Kenya. This is because Kenya has had deeply ethnicised politics and social relations that are tied to ethnic political patrons and elites who are always at the forefront of constitutional design outcomes. This explains why even with the 2010 Constitution’s attempt to weaken the imperial presidency, many Kenyans still perceive ascendancy to the presidency as the zenith of social, economic, and political actualisation. The paper, therefore, concludes that the Posner and Horowitz approaches above have merits and demerits and have also been variously applied under the 2010 Kenyan Constitution. The Ghai approach has neither been contemplated nor applied in the 2010 Kenyan Constitution. It emerges that even if the demerits under the Posner, Horowitz, and Ghai approaches were eradicated, which might be quite difficult or even impossible, and yet the zero-sum competitive politics for the presidency persists, the politicisation of ethnicity and the conflicts that stem from this will persist
The Illusion of Greener Pastures: Violence and Justice for Female Ugandan Migrant Workers in the Middle East
Get PDFHigh levels of unemployment especially among the youth remains one of Uganda’s challenges. About 165,000 Ugandans currently work in the Middle East; some in search of greener pastures through what the labour movement terms as labour expropriation. The Ugandan Government has recognised this expropriation as one providing employment opportunities for young people and good for Uganda’s economy. However, many youth - mostly young women - have fallen prey to violence and abuse meted on them by their employers, including physical and sexual abuse. This article illustrates through real experiences of Ugandan women, the negative consequences of labour expropriation, which have attracted national visibility because of the obvious human rights and gender-based violations that arise especially in the form of violence against women. The article also examines the legal and policy framework relevant to expropriation, including bilateral agreements signed between Uganda and receiving countries in the Middle East. Making reference to interviews with returnees or former domestic workers in the Middle East as well as key informants working in key institutions, this interrogation finds both the laws and structures for protection of young women inadequate in terms of meeting their subjective needs and expectations for protection against violence while working abroad. Going forward, the Ugandan Government should make deliberate efforts at addressing the plight of female migrant workers in the Middle East through strengthening the legal framework and facilitating the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development to undertake stronger monitoring of recruitment agencies, among other initiatives
Constitutional Guardianship in Kenya’s Bicameral Legislature: An Assessment of Judicial Intervention in Inter-Cameral Disputes over the Enactment of the Division of Revenue Bill
Get PDFThe Constitution of Kenya of 2010 adopts a bicameral legislative structure, within a devolved system of governance, consisting of the National Assembly and the Senate. In keeping with the devolved structure of government, the Senate’s legislative mandate is to a large extent confined to considering, debating and approving Bills concerning counties as well as determining the allocation of national revenue among counties and providing oversight over the national revenue allocated to the 47 county governments. Over the last ten years, Kenya has witnessed a great consolidation of power by the National Assembly at the expense of the Senate especially with regards to the roles of the chambers over the process of enacting the Division of Revenue Bill. Such consolidation of power attempts to relegate the Senate to a peripheral role within the bicameral legislative institutional structure. Consequently, the Supreme Court has asserted its advisory power and the High Court its judicial review power to mete out this inter-institutional conflict between the National Assembly and the Senate. This paper interrogates the manner Kenyan courts have discharged the contested role of serving as guardians of a legislative institution in a conflict within the bicameral legislative system. It makes the point that while courts have the authority to intervene in inter-cameral conflicts, judicial intervention should be exercised as an option of last resort, only utilised after exhaustion of the constitutionally ordained intra-parliament mediation process
International Solidarity, Human Rights and Life on the African Continent ‘After’ the Pandemic
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has left a massive amount of disease, death, fear and despair in its stride, and will continue to seriously trouble the world even in its wake. To be sure, Africa has not been spared any of these maladies. In the result, the pandemic has posed a formidable threat to the enjoyment of human rights around the world. More specifically, as is widely recognised, the pandemic (and many of the measures taken to end it) have seriously threatened or harmed the enjoyment by billions of people across the world, the continent included, of the human rights to health, life, education, food, shelter, work, freedom of movement, liberty, and freedom of assembly. Less obvious to many is the fact that the pandemic (and the dominant responses to it) can also constitute serious harm to the enjoyment of the rights to development and democracy, and to freedom from discrimination and gender-based violence. Even more troubling is the fact that these dangers and impacts tend to be exacerbated in the Global South to which Africa belongs geo-politically and identity-wise, and in relation to the poor and the racially marginalised everywhere
Burying the Kasuku Syndrome: Constructing Inventive Sites of Knowledge
Get PDFHaving come here to advocate the immediate burial of ‘kasuku culture,’ alias, ‘parrot culture,’ I had better initiate the process of grave-digging myself. As an African academician, poet, playwright, artist, cultural worker and activist, I have sought to do this in different ways. One such way has been using my intellectual work to affirm progressive indigenous African paradigms, including orature, which Pio Zirimu and Austin Bukenya once concisely defined as ‘verbal art.’1 I will, therefore, use an African Orature style of delivery to hold this conversation with you. I cannot think of a more appropriate tool of competing with fatigue at the end of a long day, or of keeping a possible dozing audience alive, following such a challenging dinner. My talk, or palaver, will be divided into movements or cycles, labelled palaver one to ten. Inside each of these full stream palavers will be meandering tributaries of smaller, but related palavers. If the meanderings interfere with your focus, therefore, just find ways of tolerating them. For instance, treat them as the musings of an elder-in-the-making, borrowing a leaf from the wazee wakumbuka (elders recollect), an extremely popular kipindi (program) that used to air on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) radio network sometime in the 1970s
Legal Education and its Contemporary Challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFThere is an increasing criticism against law schools. To some, the system does not sufficiently prepare students for the market or to meet society’s needs. Others argue that technology and current trends should inspire new business models in the legal profession. Legal education is also being accused of emphasising theoretical content rather than skills necessary for practice, with the character of African jurisprudence struggling for recognition in the contemporary curriculum. Moreover, a fragmented society under pressure from global shifting values also faces perennial legal challenges relating to issues of justice and other ethical problems trained lawyers may face. Therefore, the role of legal education ought to be re-examined to prioritise the common good without threatening individual interests, which is what the rule of law aims at achieving. This paper investigates the problem from the perspective of unity of knowledge to address the traditional theory-andpractice divide in legal education and argues that the idea of unity of knowledge provides the basis for a correct interdisciplinary approach to solving the problem, relying on systems of legal training as they have developed in some parts of Africa especially Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Considering such illustrations, this framework is also likely to enable a rational articulation of theory and practice in legal training that can create more space for African views of law as reflected in the current efforts to decolonise legal education in South Africa
The Commonification of Food as an Approach for the Achievement of Food Security: and the Realisation of the Right to Food for All
No full textThe commodification of food is one of the many causes of food insecurity as it occasions the inability of poor households to access the available food because of high prices and dysfunctional markets. A change of approach from commodification to commonification to deal with food insecurity at the national, regional and global level is the way to go. As commodification of food is a social construct adopted as a result of deliberate societal policy-making, commonification can similarly be adopted through legal and institutional design at the local, national and international levels; creating polycentric systems for the management of food-producing resources for the local communities. With commonification, decisions relating to the use of local resources for the production, processing, distribution and consumption of food are made at the local level, to ensure that other socioeconomic and cultural aspects of food are considered in the decision-making processes. The integrated aspects of the right to food and food democracy are critical components of the commonification approach to food security
The Strategic Utility of Lawfare: Orde F Kittrie’s Study of How International Law Can be Weaponised
No full textLawfare is a term that is truly base, common and popular. From a commercial catchword used by travel agencies to sell cheap airfares to lawyers, to a deprecatory word for the ‘individualistic and accusatorial aspects of law in Western societies,’ to the descriptor of joining transnational organisations in order to subvert the interpretations of law, to delegitimising strategies of weak actors in international forums who turn the law against the just and powerful actors, lawfare has multiple meanings depending on the context of its use. Yet for all its ordinary, contradictory and evolving usage, lawfare is amenable to principled definition, practical elaboration and strategic utilisation for national security