Posts by: Solomon Dersso
On 11 April 2019, the Sudanese army announced the overthrow of the government of President Omar Hansen Al Bashir. It also declared the suspension of the constitution and the parliament and the establishment of a transitional military council that plans to govern the country for a period of two years. African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson, […]
Continue Reading →After hours of keeping the public waiting, the Sudan military made the long awaited announcement that the embattled long time President of the East African country has finally succumbed to the same pressure that catapulted him to power three decades earlier. Sudan has been under the grip of popular protests that began on 19 December […]
Continue Reading →In the preamble to the Protocol of the Constitutive Act Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU), AU member states’ lamented that ‘no single internal factor has contributed more to … the suffering of the civilian population [in Africa] than the scourge of conflicts within and […]
Continue Reading →The African Union (AU) norm relating to unconstitutional changes of government (UCG) distinguishes the African peace and security order from other regional and global peace and security orders. This norm assigns the regional organization an intrusive role unparalleled by other international organizations as far as the constitutional and democratic order of member states is concerned. The norm bans UCG and also provides for enforcement measures that received regional constitutional status in the founding treaty establishing the AU. Despite its emergence accompanying the democratization process that countries on the continent ventured into in the 1990s, seen in the light of Africa’s unhappy experience with illegal change or seizure of government, this norm cannot be dissociated from the continent’s concern about peace and security.
Continue Reading →The current crisis in The Gambia has a simple story. On 1 December 2016 presidential elections were held in the country with the incumbent Yahya Jammeh and the opposition leader Mr Adama Barrow as frontrunners. The following day, the Independent Electoral Commission of the Gambia announced a surprising result, Jammeh lost the election by 39.6 […]
Continue Reading →This paper analyzes the African Union (AU)’s normative framework on Unconstitutional Changes of Government (UCG), and is intended to serve three purposes: to trace the origins of the norm, identifying the major gaps; to review the AU’s implementation and enforcement of the norm; and to discuss potential means for reconciling the identified gaps between the norm and practice.
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