Social Science Research Council

Wednesday, 4 August 2010, will indisputably be a date for future generations of Kenyans to remember. Following more than 20 years of debate and several attempts at passing a new constitution, Kenya finally succeeded.

Yesterday, former South African president Thabo Mbeki addressed the Fifth Al Jazeera Annual Forum in Doha, Qatar. He described and analysed in detail the South African experience of negotiating the transition to democracy, and drew some lessons relevant to the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The text of his address is available here: Thabo Mbeki Doha [...]

This article is part of a debate organized by Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) in collaboration with Moi University (Eldoret) and Pambazuka News. A selection of essays based on this debate will be published in an edited volume by Fahamu Books. For PDF documents of the debate please go to www.csls.ox.ac.uk/otjr.php.

From the standpoint of constitutional law, the handing over of the Waki envelope to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) represents the ceding of judicial autonomy of the state to an ‘exceptional court’. The establishment of a domestic special tribunal which supplants the supervisory jurisdiction of the High Court and strips the president and attorney general of constitutional powers and immunities has a similar effect.

At the conclusion of its Summit in Sirte, Libya, on July 1, 2009, the Assembly of Heads of State and Governments of the African Union (AU) decided that “AU Member States shall not cooperate … in the arrest and surrender of President Omar El Bashir of The Sudan.” In a press release issued two weeks later, on July 14, the organisation explained that this decision “bears testimony to the glaring reality that the situation in Darfur is too serious and complex an issue to be resolved without recourse to an harmonised approach to justice and peace, neither of which should be pursued at the expense of the other.”