Doctor Legum - LLD / The crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are customary international law crimes. The African continent has experienced quite a number of cases involving these crimes, and the continent's ability and willingness to prosecute offenders’ remains in doubt. As a result, in the past decade or so, non-African states have sought to institute proceedings against African leaders accused of perpetrating international customary law crimes. These attempts have taken two distinct formats, the first being the use of Universal Jurisdiction {UJ), and the second being the attempts by the International Criminal Court {ICC) to indict and prosecute African leaders. The African Union {AU) has vehemently opposed both these attempts on the grounds that they are inspired by neo-colonial thinking that is aimed at stifling peace and reconciliation efforts on the continent.Proponents of UJ argue that this principle is fundamental to international justice and the global fight to end impunity for international crimes. UJ allows a state to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed outside its territory and for which the normal jurisdictional links of nationality and passive personality do not exist. Although the concept of UJ has been part of international law for quite some time, its relevance today has been questioned by national courts and international judicial bodies. Its recent usage by both Belgian and French courts, as well as by international tribunals, such as the ICC, has attracted sharp criticism from many African states. Given that African states constitute the biggest block of signatory states to the Rome Statute, their voice cannot be ignored. Their principal concern is that the ICC is unfairly targeting African leaders for prosecution. The negative sentiment is also evidenced by some African leaders' deliberate refusal to comply with ICC requests or to cooperate in cases where warrants of arrest have been issued against African leaders, such as in the case of the Sudanese President, Omar Al Bashir, and the present prosecution of the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto. Given the aversion shown by African states to ICC prosecution of state leaders, and attempts by some non-African states to resort to UJ in order to try African leaders, the question is whether African states themselves have a solution to the problem of impunity on the continent? The answer might lie, partly, in the age old concept of UJ, where individual African states might be able to exercise jurisdiction over the international crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It might also lie in the ability and willingness of African states to strengthen the Continent’s own, regional institutions by setting up an African international criminal tribunal, or strengthening an existing one to deal with these issues. It therefore becomes important to assess what the African standpoint on UJ is, as against what the practical realities are. In other words, what continental or regional institutions exist to combat impunity for international crimes: what do states do in fact?

The purpose of this thesis was to examine how liberalization and the introduction of pro-poor policies can be successful in post-conflict countries using the Rwanda coffee market as a case study. My research supports the notion that economic development, political stability and peace can be a result of liberalization when policies that are pro-poor and focus on the largest sector of the population are created. The study examines why and how Rwanda chose to liberalize their economy in the way they did by focusing on the intentions of the actors and the effects their actions have had on the coffee market and country as a whole. The findings suggest that Rwanda’s coffee market liberalization has been successful and has contributed to stability and economic development in Rwanda. The conclusion indicates that pro-poor liberalization policies with the assistance from a variety of actors and institutions can lead developing countries on the path to development in ways the international community has not seen before.

In 2003, a conflict broke out in Darfur, Sudan’s western province, between the mainly “African” rebels and the government forces and their proxy “Arab” militias. It is estimated that about 200,000 people have so far died in the conflict from fighting, disease, and starvation. The UN and aid agencies estimate that over two million Darfurians, out of the population of about six million, are living in refugee camps. Even though the majority of all deaths in Darfur have occurred in 2003 and 2004, the conflict is nowhere near the end. Even after more than five years since the Darfur conflict began, there is hardly any comprehensive information about the rebels’ aims, objectives, and plans for the future. We cannot fully understand the conflict and plan peace negotiations between the warring parties if we do not know enough about the rebels. This study has critically explored the aims and perspectives of the Justice and Equality Movement, currently the most powerful Darfur rebel movement. The author has used the first-hand information gathered through interviews with the representatives of the rebel movement and additional data about the conflict and the rebels collected through an extensive literature analysis to portray the movement and its aims, perspectives, and plans for the future. Using the grounded theory approach as the data analysis tool, the author has presented key findings about the Darfur conflict from the perspective of the Justice and Equality Movement that have emerged from the data collected in this study.

Sudan is located in the Northern part of the African continent and has a total land mass of 2.5 million square kilometres, with an estimated population of about 39.15 million people.1 Before the secession that established the South as an independent state from the North, Sudan was the largest country on the continent and hitherto was administered as a colony under the British mandate. From 1898 the United Kingdom (UK) and Egypt administered Sudan as an Anglo-Egyptian territory but North and South Sudan were administered as separate provinces of the condominium.2 In the early 1920s, the British passed the Closed District Ordinances which stipulated that passports were required for travelling between the two zones. Permits were also required to conduct business from one zone to the other, and totally separate administrations prevailed.3 However, in 1946 the British administration reversed its policy and decided to integrate North and South Sudan under one government. The South Sudanese authorities were informed at the Juba Conference of 1947 that they will be governed in the future under a common administrative authority with the north.5 From 1948, 13 delegates nominated by the British authorities represented the South in the Sudan Legislative Assembly. Many Southerners felt betrayed by the British as they were largely excluded from the new government. To them, it was a strategy by the British aimed at protecting their interest as far as colonial legacy is concerned.6 They complained that the language of the new government was Arabic and they were under represented. Of the eight hundred positions vacated by the British in 1953, only four were given to the Southerners. The political structure in the South was not as organized as that in the North and for this reason, political groupings and parties from the South were not represented at the various conferences that established the modern state of Sudan. As a result, many southerners did not consider Sudan to be a legitimate state. Although the Sudanese state was considered illegitimate by the Southerners, the Sudanese parliament unilaterally declared Sudan’s independence on 1st January 1956.8 Subsequently, the Arab-led Khartoum government reneged on promises it had made to Southerners to create a federal system. This led to a mutiny led by Southern army officers and sparked off a civil war after independence in 1956.9 Besides the issues highlighted above, the Abyei region of Sudan is rich in natural mineral resources and has been a bone of contention between the North and South. It has also affected Darfur negatively as most of the rebel groups involved in the Darfur conflict, like the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equity Movement (JEM), also seek for a share in the wealth of the region.10 However, before the June 2011 referendum, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon called for the Sudan to withdraw all police officers from the Abyei region of South Sudan.11 Although the referendum resulted in the Republic of South Sudan, separating it from the North which remains the Republic of Sudan, political views expressed by the provinces in the North region have further captured more attention from the international community.12 The quest for Arab domination is common in this area and, one among the leading regions that have fallen prey to this practice is Darfur

The graduation thesis describes some problems of Africa in last 50 years and it pays special attention to the case of Rwanda. It contains also a short history of the african continent as the roots of many conflits have originated hundreds of years ago. It concretely describes 6 african countries: Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda and a special chapter is dedicated to the civil war and genocide in Rwanda.

International humanitarian law, international criminal law and international human rights law all share the common goal of seeking to regulate the behavior of international actors in relation to the three most serious offences under international law - genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. International legal rules, processes and institutions within these three areas of law represent the international community's ongoing quest to address and prevent the commission of these crimes - to create "a more humane world under law." International law has therefore been relied upon as the primary - arguably exclusive - mechanism for prescribing rules of conduct and for enforcing prescribed rules. It is clear, however, that the legal framework alone has not been able to bridge the gap between internationally agreed standards and substantive practice on the part of international actors. That international law comprises only a partial solution to the problem of human rights atrocities is well recognized. It is argued here that the international community's preoccupation with international law as the means for regulating State and individual behavior in this area has in fact contributed to continuing problems of non-compliance as much as it has assisted in engendering compliance with the law. In other words, law is as much a part of the problem as it is a part of the solution. It is argued that the international community must look beyond the law, to non-traditional, informal influences operating alongside the law, in order to move towards the goal of effective enforcement of the law prohibiting genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Based on Constructivist thinking, four key strategies - departures from traditional Positivist-Realist conceptions of the international legal system - are suggested as focal points for enhancing compliance with the laws in this area, these being: active differentiation between the target subjects of the law; utilization of the dual power of international humanitarian law; employing social norms and ethical values as motivations for compliance with the law; and embracing the informal compliance-inducing activities and powers of non-state actors. Applying these strategies to the humanitarian law enforcement project, a reversal of traditional perceptions of the influence of ethics and law in relation to individual and State target subjects respectively, is proposed as a future direction for enhancing compliance and furthering the prevention project in relation to genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

This project is a critical evaluation of the relevance of Hannah Arendt’s concept of freedom to African political thought. Freedom is one of the most perplexing aspects of human life, and to determine precisely what freedom consists in is, for most scholars and theorists, hard. What is more, the question of freedom raises fundamental issues about the nature of man. Freedom could be seen as an essential human need and the true mark of humanity; mere survival without that does not constitute a truly human life. Philosophers and political theorists in postcolonial Africa have for a long time been preoccupied with restoring the lost ‘humanity’, or identity, of the African people. Nonetheless, the search for identity in itself is futile if it is not in the first place a search for freedom. Arendt (1958) defines freedom as political action: the capacity to begin something new and unexpected; the capacity to break with seemingly automatic processes or continuities. She argues that political action discloses the identity of the agent; it is through action and speech that individuals reveal themselves as unique individuals and disclose to the world their distinct personalities. The question of freedom in Hannah Arendt presents a challenge to modern ways of considering it. Contemporary categories of freedom impede the development of the individual’s capacities for agency and action by distorting the distinction between the private and the public spheres and also by adhering to a problematic notion of individuality. This project evaluates the relevance of Arendt’s political philosophy through five major themes: the rise of the modern self from the social, economic and cultural developments in Europe from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century; the ontological foundation of human rights and the problem of twentieth century political evil; human status and the reality of politics in Africa; the delineation of the public/private spheres; and finally, the redefinition of political freedom. The project takes as its background the political upheavals and violence of the twentieth century, which have been described by some critics as the scourge of modernity. The twentieth century was marked by evil – two world wars, which left people homeless and uprooted; totalitarianism, whose violent population politics led to the annihilation of about six million Jews; and the invention of nuclear weapons. Man would have breathed a sigh of relief at the dawn of the twenty-first century, but as reality reared its ugly head, the transition was a mere passage of time – the elements of the twentieth century political evil are here with us in the present. Twenty-first-century man is horrified at what fellow humans are capable of – at what man may do and what the world may become. For Arendt, it is not a relief that the new millennium offers, but a new opportunity for us to transform elements such as anti-Semitism and racism. This possibility of a new beginning forms the core of Arendt’s analysis of human freedom. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Philosophy / unrestricted

Recent reports on the forced sterilization of Uyghur women in the People’s Republic of China prompted experts to recognize the on-going situation as genocide. The aim of this thesis is to examine the different events that constitute the current genocide of the Uyghur nation in China, what led to it, and how it is likely to further develop. Based on Stanton’s 10 Stages of Genocide, a simple historical process research is conducted to analyse the causes and stages of the Uyghur genocide, and to make predictions regarding the ensuing stages and international intervention. By applying the theory of constructivism to the analysis, it becomes evident that genocide is a process that is produced by the social, economic, and political international structure, which renders many prevention measures ineffective. The thesis concludes that only immediate international intervention and prosecution of the perpetrator on the count of genocide conspiracy can prevent the irreversible destruction of the Uyghur nation.

When describing sexual violence as a ’weapon of war’ or as systematic in the setting of a conflict, many times there is no distinction between how it is used during different types of conflicts. Moreover, they are often discussed as either a crime against the ”enemy” or a crime against women. This research seeks to describe sexual violence during the genocides of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and to find whether there is an underlying genocidal intent. It also aims to emphasize the intersectional nature of such crimes — the targeting of a woman on the basis of both gender and group belonging. With the use of books, journal and research articles, reports and interview transcripts — this paper is based on a qualitative research method aiming to describe the underlying intent of the strategic use of sexual violence targeting women in genocide. It is the interpretation of the gathered material and theories which enables the discussion to take form. The genocidal intent behind rapes and sexual violence is not only to use women as reproductive vessels, prevent births within a group and inflict such injuries that would make a woman suffer and become less worthy in her community — but also to humiliate a group through sexual violence in a way that fragments it into elimination. By acknowledging the heightened effect sexual violence and its genocidal intent has on the intersection of group belonging and gender, women’s suffering is not overshadowed by the atrocity of genocide. Women are often discriminated against on either the basis of ethnicity or gender; however, when one emphasizes both elements as reasons for women being targets of genocidal sexual violence, perhaps the crimes could be properly dealt with and responded to by the international community. The research concludes that the systematic use of forced impregnation, mutilation, sexual humiliation and targeting of female identity carries a genocidal intent — resulting in the fragmentation of cultures and communities and furthers female subordination. The crime of genocidal sexual violence is a crime against the individual woman and the group of which she belongs.

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