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Title: | Recent experiences in South Africa and Ethiopia to accommodate cultural diversity: a regained interest in the right of self-determination |
Authors: | Henrard, Kristin Smis, Stefaan |
Year: | 2000 |
Periodical: | Journal of African Law |
Volume: | 44 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 17-51 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Ethiopia South Africa |
Subjects: | plural society self-government |
Abstract: | This article attempts to relate the right to self-determination to the accommodation of cultural diversity in the domestic legal orders of South Africa and Ethiopia, two countries which have tried to come to terms with their recent past through accepting the diversity of their populations. The article discusses the subject of the right of self-determination, sketching a definition of the concept of 'people'; it presents the two broad dimensions of the right to self-determination: external and internal; and it provides an analysis of the two cases: postapartheid South Africa and the 1994 Ethiopian constitution. The case studies demonstrate that a reasonable accommodation of the wishes of the distinctive population groups in a multinational State respecting the principle of substantive equality and the right to identity of 'population groups', would provide an appropriate degree of internal self-determination, thus preempting calls for and actions of external self-determination. The paradox of the democratization revolution in Africa at the beginning of the 1990s is that democracy and the recognition of community rights are two faces of the same coin. Ethiopia as well as South Africa could represent important role models. Notes, ref., sum. (p. I). |