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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Some reflections on the framework of economic, social and cultural rights in Africa |
Author: | Oloka-Onyango, Joe |
Year: | 1995 |
Periodical: | The Review - International Commission of Jurists |
Issue: | 55 |
Pages: | 167-193 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Africa |
Subjects: | African organizations African agreements human rights African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights |
Abstract: | Independence constituted the second 'partition' of Africa as what had hitherto been relatively autonomous communities were forcefully amalgamated and frozen within the sovereign nation-State. This is reflected in the activities of the OAU during its first twenty years, when the principal right to which it directed attention was the right to self-determination of colonial States. Individuals or communities did not feature in this paradigm of self-determination. It was not until 1981, with the promulgation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, that the OAU gave normative recognition to individual and peoples' rights. In the same year, the OAU published the Lagos Plan of Action, and in 1989 there followed the publication of the ECA's African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes (AAF-SAP). The present article analyses these three documents with a view to arriving at a more complete picture of the approach to economic and social rights adopted by the two organizations. It argues that the struggle for the promotion of economic and social rights in Africa has to take place first and foremost at the national (government) and local (non-government) levels. Notes, ref. |