International Law

Now that the commencement of AFCTA has been postponed in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need for a clear conceptualisation of flexibility in relation to the commitments and obligations created in African RTAs including the AFCTA. There is also a need to identify how some narratives that are subsumed in the flexibility paradigm may end up doing more harm than good to informal trade engagements in the continent.

governments need to ensure that the interventionary measures they seek to implement must be tempered with and evaluated against the special needs and dynamics of their countries. The fragility of our economies, the growing debt levels, the development challenges they pose, and the social and economic vulnerability of a significant segment of our populations ought to be important considerations in developing response and containment measures against Covid-19.

On 22 April, the President of Madagascar Andry Rajoelina, launched what he called a cure for coronavirus, Covid Organics (CVO). The announcement drew interest from a few African countries and to date countries like Tanzania, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia and Senegal have already received shipment of CVO. While some have been sceptical about the remedy, others have praised it as an example of traditional medicine, reigniting a discussion around traditional medicine and intellectual property rights.

In addition to BITs and IP laws, the Nigerian government can rely on the international law principle of necessity to justify taking measures such as compulsory licencing, yet the successful use of this principle depends on satisfying various conditions. Meanwhile, applicability of the customary doctrine of police powers to the claims arising under BITs has been accepted. This means that ISDS tribunals should thus attach normative propriety to state regulation in an epidemic.

The Symposium will combine essays that are invited and that are selected from the submissions responding to this Call. We welcome essays responding and reflecting on the issues and perspectives raised by the report on `Teaching and Researching International Law in Asia’ recently released by the Centre for International Law.

Finally, we have seen a surge in climate activism, especially from children and young adults, especially after Greta Thunberg launched the Fridays for Future (FFF) Movement in August 2018. FFF is a global movement that seeks to ‘put moral pressure on policymakers, to make them listen to the scientists, and then to take forceful action to limit global warming.’

The Award in Oded Besserglik v. Republic of Mozambique, one of the very few publicly known intra African treaty-based investment arbitration cases, was issued 29th October 2019. The case started when in March 2014, a South African national (Mr. Besserglik) filed an application, before the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), against the Mozambique (the Respondent) on the grounds that his shares and interests in a joint fishing venture with some Mozambican State-owned enterprises, as well as his vessels, were unlawfully and fraudulently appropriated by the Respondent.

Following the conclusion of the four-part Symposium on COVID-19 and International Economic Law in the Global South, Afronomicslaw.org is pleased to announce three follow-up webinars to continue the conversation

Under the Model Conventions, each African country has lost taxation rights over cross-border workers who have been evacuated from it but who are still deriving income from it through telework. Telework, a term originally coined by Jack Nilles, is ‘the activity of working from home while communicating with your office by phone or email, or using the internet’. The COVID-19 pandemic has made social distancing an imperative and, consequently, we are witnessing an unprecedented reliance on telework.

The current international, regional and national architecture of Intellectual Property law confers privileges to foreign transitional interest blocks in order to profit from patents by extending, trademarks, copyrights and so on for longer periods of time. This legal enclave diminishes the possibility of developing technologies, including diagnostics, medicines, vaccines and other medical supplies vital to treating patients infected by COVID-19 and it hampers efforts to distribute them in a timely manner to all the countries currently affected by the pandemic. However, the creative elements of a new global system are emerging now, one characterized by coordination between WIPO, WTO and WHO.