Obiora Chinedu Okafor
Biographic Data
| ID | 116218 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Obiora Chinedu Okafor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Obiora Chinedu |
| FAMILY NAME | Okafor |
| SIGNATURE | OKAFOR O C |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2786-184X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Between Robust Norms and Centrifugal Realities: Gaps and Challenges in the Implementation of Africa’s Regional Law on Unconstitutional Changes of Government
Much of Africa’s “post-colonial” history has been characterized by a struggle between democratic and anti-democratic forces. Today the former are now mostly ascendant on the continent, but the tendencies are not uniform. 1 With at least five successful coups in four countries between 2020 and 2023 (Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso x 2, and Niger), the West African region accounted for the vast majority of all the unconstitutional changes of government …
Introduction to the Symposium on Africa’s International Law of Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Solidarity Spectrum: De-Solidarity, Anti-Solidarity, and Resistance
In this essay, we examine legal and political challenges to solidarity with and among migrants. We begin by describing the disturbing and powerful turn toward de -solidarity, particularly in some Global North countries, that threatens to undermine the global refugee and migration law regime. Politicians seek to capitalize upon racial fears of migrants from the Global South to reject solidarity (with the latter group) as a concept and pursue anti-…
Africa as a ‘Theatre’ of International Law and Development: Knowledge, Practice, and Resistance
This chapter provides an account of the ways in which the international project of development has been received, embraced, and contested in Africa, and the roles that law, often a potent instrument of change and control, has played in framing and shaping that encounter. In viewing Africa as a regional ‘theatre’ of the international law and development project, the chapter principally offers an account of the ways in which international law and d…
The Ecowas Court and Civil Society Activists in Nigeria: An Anatomy and Analysis of a Robust Symbiosis
This article focuses on, and attempts to explain, two key aspects of the relationship between the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS Court and Nigerian civil society activists or CSA s. It analyses the available evidence on the ways in which these CSA s have contributed – to the generation of this regional court’s impact on the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government in Nigeria…
Canada–AU human rights engagements: A TWAIL perspective
Despite the problematique of Global North/South relationships, human rights require transnational collaboration to successfully protect vulnerable people in the world. In particular, human rights engagements between Africa and the West are cemented in legacies of colonialism and mediated by development discourses that portray the continent as a paragon of poverty, corruption and backwardness. Within this context, we explore how an African Union (…
The Socialization of Human Rights and the African Human Rights Action Plan: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities
This article critically analyzes human rights socialization in Africa through the lens of the draft African Human Rights Action Plan ( AHRAP ). It argues that the AHRAP presents a framework for human rights socialization, and it speaks to human rights socialization in distinctive ways. The article demonstrates that the AHRAP relies on African and international influences and seeks to propagate norms inspired by these influences. It analyzes three…
Assessing the African Union's 2016–19 Human Rights Action Planning Process: Embracing, and De-Coupling from, the Conventional “Ideal”
This article assesses the African Union's planning process regarding the development of the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) against the dominant or conventional “ideal” or model of human rights action planning. It examines the extent to which the AU's process followed or departed from the conventional model, the strengths and weaknesses of the AU human rights action planning process, and the lessons scholars and policymakers have learned…
The Future of International Solidarity in Global Refugee Protection
Presence through absence? Understanding the role of capital in the African Human Rights Action Plan
This study examines the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) through the lens of Upendra Baxi's germinal theory on the emergence in our time of a 'trade-related, market-friendly human rights' (TREMF) thesis that is challenging the specific understandings of 'people-centric' human rights that are predicated in the letter and spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDH). Baxi contends, instead, that the dominant strands of the cont…
Poverty in the Human Rights Jurisprudence of the Nigerian Appellate Courts (1999–2011)
The major objective of this article is to examine the extent to which the human rights jurisprudence of the Nigerian appellate courts has been sensitive and / or receptive to the socio-economic and political claims of Nigeria's large population of the poor and marginalized. In particular, the article considers: the extent to which Nigerian human rights jurisprudence has either facilitated or hindered the efforts of the poor to ameliorate their ow…
Enacting Twailian Praxis in Nonacademic Habitats: Toward a Conceptual Framework
The roles that Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars could play in political and/or socio-economic struggles beyond the academy, and the relationships of these scholars to politicians, diplomats activists, civil servants, peasant movements, civil society, and other nonacademic actors are issues as important to TWAIL as they are understudied and underenacted. The three essays in this TWAIL Symposium take up this theme of pra…
Democratic Legitimacy as a Criterion for the Recognition of Governments: A Response to Professor Erika de Wet
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The International Criminal Court as a 'Transitional Justice' Mechanism in Africa: Some Critical Reflections
Much scholarly writing on the International Criminal Court (ICC) gives the impression that the Court can function effectively as a primary transitional justice mechanism in Africa, and that it should, indeed, be deployed more or less frequently, liberally and robustly as such. But to what extent can this manner and degree of utilization of the ICC advance the cause of transitional justice on the continent? What, in any case, does transitional jus…
Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change: Assessing National Human Rights Institutions
National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) – human rights commissions and ombudsmen – have gained recognition as a possible missing link in the transmission and implementation of international human rights norms at the domestic level. They are also increasingly accepted as important participants in global and regional forums where international norms are produced. By collecting innovative work from experts spanning international law, political sc…
Between Elite Interests and Pro-Poor Resistance: The Nigerian Courts and Labour-Led Anti-Fuel Price Hike Struggles (1999–2007)
Between 1999 and 2007, a popular Labour-led movement led a pro-poor struggle to resist the fuel price hike policy of the Nigerian government. Waged in the context of the poverty in which nearly 70 per cent of Nigerians lived, the operation of powerful incentives to raise fuel prices, and Labour's extraordinary socio-political leverage, these struggles triggered much government frustration. One of the strategies adopted by the government to legiti…
Irrigating the famished fields: The impact of labour-led struggle on policy and action in Nigeria (1999–2007)
Between 1999 and 2007, a broad-based labour-led movement which focused most of its energies on its struggle against unpopular fuel price hikes in Nigeria was able to exert considerable, though limited, influence on an Obasanjo-led executive arm of government that was at best quasidemocratic in its orientation. This article argues that, despite the very important roles played by other factors (notably the presence of more democratic space in Niger…
Remarkable returns: The influence of a labour-led socio-economic rights movement on legislative reasoning, process and action in Nigeria, 1999-2007
During 1999-2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it repeatedly; re-orient its legislative processes; explicitly oppose virtually all of the Executive Bra…
The African Human Rights System, Activist Forces and International Institutions
This 2007 book draws from and builds upon many of the more traditional approaches to the study of international human rights institutions (IHIs), especially quasi-constructivism. The author reveals some of the ways in which many such domestic deployments of the African system have been brokered or facilitated by local activist forces, such as human rights NGOs, labour unions, women's groups, independent journalists, dissident politicians, and act…
The Precarious Place of Labour Rights and Movements in Nigeria's Dual Economic and Political Transition, 1999–2005
Caught between pressure from dominant global economic actors (such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and certain states) to implement painful socio-economic reform measures, and pressure from significant numbers of their own peoples to reject these IMF/WB-style prescriptions, formally democratic “third world” governments often yield to the demands of the former to push through such reforms, sometimes at great social c…
Poverty, agency and resistance in the future of international law: An African perspective
This article enquires into the likely posture of future international law with respect to African peoples. It does so by focusing on three of the most important issues that have defined, and are likely to continue to define, international law's engagement with Africans. These are: the grinding poverty in which most Africans live, the question of agency in their historical search for dignity, and the extent to which these African peoples can effec…
Modest harvests: On the significant (but limited) impact of human rights NGOs on legislative and executive behaviour in Nigeria
This article argues that the community of self-described human rights NGOs that are indigenous to and operate in Nigeria have, over the last fourteen years or so, exerted a modest yet significant level of influence on the behaviour of both the executive and legislative branches of government in Nigeria. This influence has been exerted despite the harshness of military regimes that ruled that country for most of the relevant period. The factors th…
The African system on Human and Peoples' Rights, quasi-constructivism, and the possibility of peacebuilding within African states
This article examines the influence that IHIs (such as the African System on Human and Peoples' Rights) can exert within states, with the facilitative work of local popular forces, and relates that to the possibility of valuable IHI contributions to peacebuilding within deeply fragmented African states. Of all the existing approaches to the study of IHIs, constructivism comes the closest to accounting for the highly significant incidences of IHI-…
Re-configuring Non-refoulement? The Suresh Decision, 'Security Relativism', and the International Human Rights Imperative
lVe conclude that gmcra@ to deport a refugee, where there are grounds to believe that this would subject the refugee to a substantial risk of torture, would unconstitutionally violate the Chartey's s.7 guarantee of life, liberty and security of the penon. This said, raa leaue opm the possibiliE that in an exceptional casc such a deportation nighl bcjustificd either in the balancing approach under ss.7 or I of the Charler
Re-Imagining International Human Rights Education in Our Time: Beyond Three Constitutive Orthodoxies
This article seeks to show that both the conceptualization and practice of international human rights education within the mainstream human rights community has been shaped and framed, with mostly negative consequences, by at least three constitutive orthodoxies: a heaven-hell binary distinction between an all but “perfect” West and an all but “hellish” Third World; a consequent unidirectional traffic of human rights teaching from the West to the…
The International Criminal Court as a 'Transitional Justice' Mechanism in Africa: Some Critical Reflections
Much scholarly writing on the International Criminal Court (ICC) gives the impression that the Court can function effectively as a primary transitional justice mechanism in Africa, and that it should, indeed, be deployed more or less frequently, liberally and robustly as such. But to what extent can this manner and degree of utilization of the ICC advance the cause of transitional justice on the continent? What, in any case, does transitional jus…
Remarkable returns: The influence of a labour-led socio-economic rights movement on legislative reasoning, process and action in Nigeria, 1999-2007
During 1999-2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it repeatedly; re-orient its legislative processes; explicitly oppose virtually all of the Executive Bra…
Poverty, agency and resistance in the future of international law: An African perspective
This article enquires into the likely posture of future international law with respect to African peoples. It does so by focusing on three of the most important issues that have defined, and are likely to continue to define, international law's engagement with Africans. These are: the grinding poverty in which most Africans live, the question of agency in their historical search for dignity, and the extent to which these African peoples can effec…
Re-Imagining International Human Rights Education in Our Time: Beyond Three Constitutive Orthodoxies
This article seeks to show that both the conceptualization and practice of international human rights education within the mainstream human rights community has been shaped and framed, with mostly negative consequences, by at least three constitutive orthodoxies: a heaven-hell binary distinction between an all but “perfect” West and an all but “hellish” Third World; a consequent unidirectional traffic of human rights teaching from the West to the…
The Future of International Solidarity in Global Refugee Protection
Presence through absence? Understanding the role of capital in the African Human Rights Action Plan
This study examines the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) through the lens of Upendra Baxi's germinal theory on the emergence in our time of a 'trade-related, market-friendly human rights' (TREMF) thesis that is challenging the specific understandings of 'people-centric' human rights that are predicated in the letter and spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDH). Baxi contends, instead, that the dominant strands of the cont…
Irrigating the famished fields: The impact of labour-led struggle on policy and action in Nigeria (1999–2007)
Between 1999 and 2007, a broad-based labour-led movement which focused most of its energies on its struggle against unpopular fuel price hikes in Nigeria was able to exert considerable, though limited, influence on an Obasanjo-led executive arm of government that was at best quasidemocratic in its orientation. This article argues that, despite the very important roles played by other factors (notably the presence of more democratic space in Niger…
The African system on Human and Peoples' Rights, quasi-constructivism, and the possibility of peacebuilding within African states
This article examines the influence that IHIs (such as the African System on Human and Peoples' Rights) can exert within states, with the facilitative work of local popular forces, and relates that to the possibility of valuable IHI contributions to peacebuilding within deeply fragmented African states. Of all the existing approaches to the study of IHIs, constructivism comes the closest to accounting for the highly significant incidences of IHI-…
The Fundamental Right to a Passport Under Nigerian Law: An Integrated Viewpoint
The struggle of Nigerian civil society for the establishment of a democratic polity, founded on the rule of law and the respect for the human and peoples’ rights of ordinary citizens of Nigeria, has been waged against the military governments that have ruled by force for the better part of its nearly three and a half decades of independent existence. During this struggle, there have been many cases of seizure of the passports of prominent opposit…
Legitimate Governance in Africa: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives
Any attempt to address the ever-present problem of instability in Africa gives rise to questions regarding legitimate governance. Without future thinking and action on the legitimacy of governance in Africa and how to secure it, past mistakes will go unheeded rather than informing forward movement. Surprisingly, no existing work has comprehensively addressed this critical issue. Legitimate Governance in Africa provides this needed coverage for th…
Re-Imagining International Human Rights Education in Our Time: Beyond Three Constitutive Orthodoxies
This article seeks to show that both the conceptualization and practice of international human rights education within the mainstream human rights community has been shaped and framed, with mostly negative consequences, by at least three constitutive orthodoxies: a heaven-hell binary distinction between an all but “perfect” West and an all but “hellish” Third World; a consequent unidirectional traffic of human rights teaching from the West to the…
Negotiating Asylum: The EU Acquis, Extraterritorial Protection and the Common Market of Deflection
Re-configuring Non-refoulement? The Suresh Decision, 'Security Relativism', and the International Human Rights Imperative
lVe conclude that gmcra@ to deport a refugee, where there are grounds to believe that this would subject the refugee to a substantial risk of torture, would unconstitutionally violate the Chartey's s.7 guarantee of life, liberty and security of the penon. This said, raa leaue opm the possibiliE that in an exceptional casc such a deportation nighl bcjustificd either in the balancing approach under ss.7 or I of the Charler
Modest harvests: On the significant (but limited) impact of human rights NGOs on legislative and executive behaviour in Nigeria
This article argues that the community of self-described human rights NGOs that are indigenous to and operate in Nigeria have, over the last fourteen years or so, exerted a modest yet significant level of influence on the behaviour of both the executive and legislative branches of government in Nigeria. This influence has been exerted despite the harshness of military regimes that ruled that country for most of the relevant period. The factors th…
The African system on Human and Peoples' Rights, quasi-constructivism, and the possibility of peacebuilding within African states
This article examines the influence that IHIs (such as the African System on Human and Peoples' Rights) can exert within states, with the facilitative work of local popular forces, and relates that to the possibility of valuable IHI contributions to peacebuilding within deeply fragmented African states. Of all the existing approaches to the study of IHIs, constructivism comes the closest to accounting for the highly significant incidences of IHI-…
Poverty, agency and resistance in the future of international law: An African perspective
This article enquires into the likely posture of future international law with respect to African peoples. It does so by focusing on three of the most important issues that have defined, and are likely to continue to define, international law's engagement with Africans. These are: the grinding poverty in which most Africans live, the question of agency in their historical search for dignity, and the extent to which these African peoples can effec…
The African Human Rights System, Activist Forces and International Institutions
This 2007 book draws from and builds upon many of the more traditional approaches to the study of international human rights institutions (IHIs), especially quasi-constructivism. The author reveals some of the ways in which many such domestic deployments of the African system have been brokered or facilitated by local activist forces, such as human rights NGOs, labour unions, women's groups, independent journalists, dissident politicians, and act…
The Precarious Place of Labour Rights and Movements in Nigeria's Dual Economic and Political Transition, 1999–2005
Caught between pressure from dominant global economic actors (such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and certain states) to implement painful socio-economic reform measures, and pressure from significant numbers of their own peoples to reject these IMF/WB-style prescriptions, formally democratic “third world” governments often yield to the demands of the former to push through such reforms, sometimes at great social c…
Irrigating the famished fields: The impact of labour-led struggle on policy and action in Nigeria (1999–2007)
Between 1999 and 2007, a broad-based labour-led movement which focused most of its energies on its struggle against unpopular fuel price hikes in Nigeria was able to exert considerable, though limited, influence on an Obasanjo-led executive arm of government that was at best quasidemocratic in its orientation. This article argues that, despite the very important roles played by other factors (notably the presence of more democratic space in Niger…
Remarkable returns: The influence of a labour-led socio-economic rights movement on legislative reasoning, process and action in Nigeria, 1999-2007
During 1999-2007, a labour-led but broad-based socio-economic rights movement, which focused on a pro-poor (and therefore highly popular) anti-fuel price hike message, persuaded and/or pressured Nigeria's federal legislature, the National Assembly, to: mediate between it and the Executive Branch of Government; take it seriously enough to lobby it repeatedly; re-orient its legislative processes; explicitly oppose virtually all of the Executive Bra…
Between Elite Interests and Pro-Poor Resistance: The Nigerian Courts and Labour-Led Anti-Fuel Price Hike Struggles (1999–2007)
Between 1999 and 2007, a popular Labour-led movement led a pro-poor struggle to resist the fuel price hike policy of the Nigerian government. Waged in the context of the poverty in which nearly 70 per cent of Nigerians lived, the operation of powerful incentives to raise fuel prices, and Labour's extraordinary socio-political leverage, these struggles triggered much government frustration. One of the strategies adopted by the government to legiti…
Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change: Assessing National Human Rights Institutions
National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) – human rights commissions and ombudsmen – have gained recognition as a possible missing link in the transmission and implementation of international human rights norms at the domestic level. They are also increasingly accepted as important participants in global and regional forums where international norms are produced. By collecting innovative work from experts spanning international law, political sc…
Democratic Legitimacy as a Criterion for the Recognition of Governments: A Response to Professor Erika de Wet
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The International Criminal Court as a 'Transitional Justice' Mechanism in Africa: Some Critical Reflections
Much scholarly writing on the International Criminal Court (ICC) gives the impression that the Court can function effectively as a primary transitional justice mechanism in Africa, and that it should, indeed, be deployed more or less frequently, liberally and robustly as such. But to what extent can this manner and degree of utilization of the ICC advance the cause of transitional justice on the continent? What, in any case, does transitional jus…
Poverty in the Human Rights Jurisprudence of the Nigerian Appellate Courts (1999–2011)
The major objective of this article is to examine the extent to which the human rights jurisprudence of the Nigerian appellate courts has been sensitive and / or receptive to the socio-economic and political claims of Nigeria's large population of the poor and marginalized. In particular, the article considers: the extent to which Nigerian human rights jurisprudence has either facilitated or hindered the efforts of the poor to ameliorate their ow…
Enacting Twailian Praxis in Nonacademic Habitats: Toward a Conceptual Framework
The roles that Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars could play in political and/or socio-economic struggles beyond the academy, and the relationships of these scholars to politicians, diplomats activists, civil servants, peasant movements, civil society, and other nonacademic actors are issues as important to TWAIL as they are understudied and underenacted. The three essays in this TWAIL Symposium take up this theme of pra…
Assessing the African Union's 2016–19 Human Rights Action Planning Process: Embracing, and De-Coupling from, the Conventional “Ideal”
This article assesses the African Union's planning process regarding the development of the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) against the dominant or conventional “ideal” or model of human rights action planning. It examines the extent to which the AU's process followed or departed from the conventional model, the strengths and weaknesses of the AU human rights action planning process, and the lessons scholars and policymakers have learned…
The Future of International Solidarity in Global Refugee Protection
Presence through absence? Understanding the role of capital in the African Human Rights Action Plan
This study examines the African Human Rights Action Plan (AHRAP) through the lens of Upendra Baxi's germinal theory on the emergence in our time of a 'trade-related, market-friendly human rights' (TREMF) thesis that is challenging the specific understandings of 'people-centric' human rights that are predicated in the letter and spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDH). Baxi contends, instead, that the dominant strands of the cont…
The Socialization of Human Rights and the African Human Rights Action Plan: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities
This article critically analyzes human rights socialization in Africa through the lens of the draft African Human Rights Action Plan ( AHRAP ). It argues that the AHRAP presents a framework for human rights socialization, and it speaks to human rights socialization in distinctive ways. The article demonstrates that the AHRAP relies on African and international influences and seeks to propagate norms inspired by these influences. It analyzes three…
The Ecowas Court and Civil Society Activists in Nigeria: An Anatomy and Analysis of a Robust Symbiosis
This article focuses on, and attempts to explain, two key aspects of the relationship between the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS Court and Nigerian civil society activists or CSA s. It analyses the available evidence on the ways in which these CSA s have contributed – to the generation of this regional court’s impact on the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government in Nigeria…
Canada–AU human rights engagements: A TWAIL perspective
Despite the problematique of Global North/South relationships, human rights require transnational collaboration to successfully protect vulnerable people in the world. In particular, human rights engagements between Africa and the West are cemented in legacies of colonialism and mediated by development discourses that portray the continent as a paragon of poverty, corruption and backwardness. Within this context, we explore how an African Union (…
Africa as a ‘Theatre’ of International Law and Development: Knowledge, Practice, and Resistance
This chapter provides an account of the ways in which the international project of development has been received, embraced, and contested in Africa, and the roles that law, often a potent instrument of change and control, has played in framing and shaping that encounter. In viewing Africa as a regional ‘theatre’ of the international law and development project, the chapter principally offers an account of the ways in which international law and d…
Political science (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Human Rights and Development (16 works) · Human rights (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (9 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (9 works) · Law (8 works)