Research on strokes using genetics and neurobiobanking has highlighted some ethical, legal and social implications. Blood donation, brain donation, blood storage, re-use and sample sharing, data sharing, return of individual results, disclosure of incidental findings, pattern and causes of preference for informed consent, governance and regulation, and biorights are some of the legal problems presented. This study, therefore, explores this aspect in Sub-Saharan Africa using Nigeria and Ghana as case studies. In exploring this aspect, a qualitative method was adopted. In addition, the general jurisprudence of law and society was adopted as the theoretical framework and applied to the findings made. It was found that the law to a high level mirrors people’s expectations and that there was an existing social order to which the law was a contributor. It is therefore argued that any need for the intervention of the law must take cognizance of these findings.

After World War II, many countries, including Nigeria, embraced Keynesian “welfarist” policies to stimulate economic growth and enhance the well-being of their citizens. However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a global economic crisis prompted a shift towards neoliberalism, leading to the commodification of social institutions and the implementation of policies such as privatization, trade liberalization and deregulation in Nigeria. This shift had a significant impact on Nigeria’s socio-legal economy, particularly in terms of property rights in company ownership. The article raises concerns about the structural injustice and growing inequality resulting from these neoliberal policies. It advocates for a legal framework that addresses these issues and proposes reconceptualizing private property rights in company ownership in Nigeria. This proposed framework aims to counter the dominance and power of property-owning elites and mitigate the structural injustice induced by neoliberal policies in Nigeria.

This article explores the challenge of financially advantaged spouses concealing assets within corporate structures during divorce proceedings, using the English legal framework as a reference point for potential reforms in Ghana. Although Ghana has made significant strides in ensuring the equitable distribution of marital property, these efforts may be insufficient if the concealment of personal or marital assets within corporate entities is not adequately addressed. The study focuses on the English legal distinction between piercing and lifting the corporate veil. It highlights that while piercing the corporate veil is a stringent measure used sparingly and typically in cases of fraud or evasion, lifting the veil is more pertinent in matrimonial disputes for revealing the actual control and ownership of assets. The article advocates for a clearer and more systematic application of the veil-lifting principles in Ghanaian law to expose hidden marital and personal assets effectively. By adopting these principles, Ghana can strengthen its legal framework to ensure a more equitable distribution of marital assets and achieve fairer outcomes in divorce proceedings.

The touchstone of judicial review in Lesotho for a long time has preeminently been the ultra vires principle. The modern conception of the doctrine of legality as a constitutional device to control the exercise of public power has not been a prominent feature of Lesotho’s public law. It has only gained traction recently. The superior courts in Lesotho – the High Court and the Court of Appeal – have ruled that the expansive doctrine of legality is now the cornerstone of constitutionalism in the country. In this new trajectory, they rely mainly on the well-developed South African legality jurisprudence. This development of constitutional law in Lesotho is laudable. However, the extent to which South African jurisprudence can inform Lesotho on this subject remains a matter of controversy. This article examines the “importation” of South African jurisprudence on legality into Lesotho, the lessons that Lesotho can derive and the future development pathways for legality in the country.

The outsourcing of traditionally military functions in Africa to private military companies (PMCs) such as the Wagner Group and the Africa Corps has been accompanied by violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. According to the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, state responsibility for these violations can be imputed to the states that employ PMCs to function as their agents, to exercise government authority or to act in the vacuum left by official authorities. States that do not intervene to prevent these abuses fail their obligations of due diligence through persistent non-action and should not be excused from demanding accountability by immunity agreements between the host and hiring states. We explore the possibility of the communitarian invocation of state responsibility by third-party states, on behalf of victims, in order to end impunity, drive accountability and secure effective redress for victims.

Conflict-related sexual violence and the rights of female victims have received scholarly attention, but the same cannot be said of post-conflict rejection and re-victimization of the victims and the violation of their rights. This article examines the rejection and re-victimization of the returnee victims / survivors of Nigeria’s Boko Haram’s sexual terrorism. It discusses how this violates their fundamental human rights as contained in various UN conventions and other legal frameworks. Relying on a legal-doctrinal approach, it examines these violations and the difficulty in enforcing such rights. Findings reveal that these human rights violations continue through the rejection and re-victimization of victims / survivors by family and community members. Despite these obvious rights violations, it has been difficult to seek legal redress for enforcing such rights due to the absence of political will on the part of the government.

Access to justice for many Kenyans remains a challenge due to the infrastructural and geographic reach of court services throughout the country. This recent development paper presents a spatial proximity analysis that quantifies the distribution of Kenya’s population proximate to the nearest court as an illustrative indicator of access to justice. The results estimate that about 3.5 per cent (1.7 million) of Kenya’s population reside more than 100 kilometres to the nearest physical courthouse, with the average distance to the nearest court per person being 22 kilometres. These considerable travel distances create significant barriers to justice, especially for rural populations, which are further aggravated by limited access to information and low levels of legal literacy. The paper concludes by discussing the current approaches, such as leveraging information and communication technologies, to expand access to court services, improve case information availability and ultimately enhance last-mile justice delivery for Kenyans living in remote regions.

This article demonstrates how international human rights treaties have the potential to fill the gaps in constitutional provisions and constitute therefore the extension of the constitutional bill of rights. Since human rights are formulated in approximately the same way in both the Francophone countries’ constitutions and in regional and international human rights treaties, through a casuistic approach, the article argues that the decisions of the human rights treaty bodies should serve as a guide to the interpretation of constitutional provisions by the Beninese constitutional judges. By being reluctant and disinterested in the decisions of its treaty monitoring bodies, the Beninese Constitutional Court deprives itself of an interpretation technique that is susceptible to strengthening the court’s legitimacy and independence. Hence, the article posits a dialogue between the Constitutional Court and the regional and international human rights treaty bodies. If at the global level, the use of UN treaties in constitutional adjudication is an essential step towards judicial globalization in human rights adjudication, at the regional level, the use of African Union treaties in constitutional adjudication is a strong signal of African “judicial” integration and therefore of Pan-Africanism.

The right to equality in South African law gives rise to duties borne by both the state and private actors. In the law of succession, this constrains private testators’ powers to discriminate. Doctrinal developments bear this out: in King v De Jager and Wilkinson v Crawford, a majority of the Constitutional Court extended the reach of anti-discrimination duties to private testamentary decisions. I evaluate these judgments through two lenses: a normative lens that focuses on the principled underpinnings of the Court’s approach to substantive equality, autonomy and the public / private divide; and an adjudicative lens that surveys how these duties should be given effect to avoid proliferating parallelism. I argue that the judgments are welcome and confirm that the private sphere is not insulated from demands of equality, but they nevertheless neglect the importance of both equality legislation and a harmonized approach to adjudicating the anti-discrimination duty’s reach into common law.

This case note highlights fundamental errors of law committed by Mabuse J in MM v OM [2024] (3) SA 133 (GP). It demonstrates that the judge failed to appreciate that the phrase “pension interest” as defined in the Divorce Act refers to a benefit held by a retirement fund that only becomes due to be shared when the court dissolves a marriage where one of the spouses is a member of the retirement fund. Most importantly, it is shown that Mabuse J ignored the binding precedent of the Supreme Court of Appeal and failed to consider other judgments of the High Court, which clearly explain that where an exit event from the fund is anything but divorce, there can be no pension interest that the court can order to be shared. This note argues that the law was incorrectly applied in this case, and its approach, reasoning and conclusion must be rejected.

This article explores the interaction between the Conseil de la Concurrence (Competition Council) and the Autorité de Régulation de la Poste et des Communications Électroniques (Telecommunications and Postal Regulatory Authority) (ARPCE) in the Algerian legal system. Algerian policy-makers have given special consideration to the issue of overlapping jurisdiction between these two authorities. The article discusses the Algerian strategy to resolve regulatory overlaps in the electronic communications market and also highlights the intervention of the ARPCE as a competition authority for the electronic communications market. Furthermore, the article analyses the Optimum Telecom Algeria case as a turning point in restoring the Competition Council’s role and highlights the need for systematizing the intervention of the two authorities. Finally, the article provides a forward-looking perspective through proposing a memorandum of understanding to promote cooperation between the Competition Council and the ARPCE.

In January 2019, Nigeria enacted the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act, which provides for a joint legal framework for both competition and consumer protection. This article examines the theoretical and practical rationale for integrating competition and consumer protection, recognizing that, while related, the two may pursue distinct goals and operate under different principles. It provides a lens to review the issues an African country faces following integration, especially in the broader normative discussion of the goals of competition law. Although there is literature investigating the integration of consumer protection and competition, there is still nothing that examines the place of consumer protection in the wider theoretical context of competition for developing countries, particularly how they balance efficiency with other goals of competition. The article also offers the first academic review of the five-year practice of competition law and its application in Nigeria.

There has been recurrent agitation for external self-determination by most of the South-East people of modern Nigeria through the secessionist group the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). This agitation reached crisis point in 2015 with military action which escalated into a violent confrontation, in which the IPOB claimed some of their members were killed. The IPOB’s request for external self-determination fell on deaf ears, however, the counter-claim being that Nigerian territorial integrity cannot be compromised. This article examines the right to self-determination under international law and in the African system, as well as the types of this right that have been identified by scholars and whether the IPOB’s call can be justified. It argues that the type of self-determination sought by the IPOB and the manner in which they seek it may not be attainable under international law, except through a consensus-based process between the Nigerian government and the South-East people of Nigeria.

In the recent case of Ezuame Mannan v Attorney General and Speaker of Parliament,1the Ghanaian Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision struck down the Narcotics Control Commission Act, 2020 (Act 1019), on grounds that the parliamentary processes leading to its enactment were unconstitutional. In arriving at this decision, the court strived to define the limits of Parliament’s legislative powers. While some clarity was achieved, difficult contradictions emerged. Prominent among these was the extent to which the constitutional power of judicial review over legislative actions should interfere with the autonomy of Parliament. In this article, I propose that a proper understanding and application of the purposive approach to interpretation offers an effective tool for reconciling these seemingly conflicting constitutional values.

In order for accused persons with disabilities to be able to access justice on an equal basis with others, equality of outcomes is important. However, in the past century, the limited approach to legal aid which focuses on processes has continually been applied by criminal justice system actors in response to legal aid challenges faced by accused persons with disabilities in Kenya. The major dilemma facing this approach is its emphasis on steps to be taken as opposed to the end result or goal. This paper seeks to explain that a shift towards an outcomes approach to legal aid for accused persons with disabilities has the potential of supporting innovation in Kenya’s criminal justice system and help close access to justice gaps that may exist. To achieve this paradigm shift, the African Disability Protocol has been employed as it promotes an integral development of legal aid justice that requires states parties to put in place specific outcomes-based laws for promoting the rights of accused persons in access to justice.

The application by states of economic principles in education has not produced good results in access to education in low-income and less-developed countries. This prompted UNESCO to designate countries with substantial problems of access to education and illiteracy as the E-9 countries, which include Nigeria. Nigeria’s status as an E-9 country indicates the existence of considerable problems in education, and where necessary, statistical evidence will be used to elucidate Nigeria’s E-9 status. This article argues that the nature of the laws and policy mechanisms that control education in Nigeria suggests that the country seems to be responding to the contemporaneous demands of global programmes of action in education that are predicated on economic principles and driven by the tides of globalization instead of to the requirements of international human rights law.

The purpose of the South African Competition Act is to resolve the present problems of inequality by emphasizing its multiple goals, which differ from those of other countries. Its objectives broadly contain efficiency, state economic development and consumer welfare. In addition, the ideas of providing opportunities for small businesses and promoting a greater spread of ownership among different groups indicate its goal of favouring or protecting weak trading parties or certain groups of people. To achieve the aim of equity and fairness, South African competition law should be vigorously applied, but the existing substantive provisions may not fulfil the task of moving towards an equal and fair society. A comparative study of competition law may help to discover a proper model and a better solution for the problems of unequal economic power in South Africa.

Nigeria’s legal system is pluralistic with the common law, Islamic law and customary law as the main legal traditions. These legal traditions have their courts within a unified judiciary. Disputes relating to the appointment of imams often end in the English-style courts rather than Islamic courts. This paper examines the controversies regarding which courts within the Nigerian plural courts system have or should have the original and appellate jurisdiction in such disputes. The paper argues that mosques are waqf properties and thus should come within the ambit of Islamic personal law as defined by the Constitution. The paper concludes, inter alia, that in all instances, the courts vested with jurisdiction to hear disputes relating to the appointment of imams should be operated by judges who are learned in Islamic law and where this is not possible, the courts should use assessors who are experts in Islamic law to assist the judges.

Excessive consumption of energy drinks poses significant risks, including the development of various non-communicable diseases. This trend is driven by a combination of the desire to remain alert and the strategic use of catchy advertising slogans by manufacturers, particularly targeting young adolescents. Unlike tobacco products, which are similarly linked to such diseases, Nigeria lacks legislation requiring energy drink manufacturers to warn consumers about potential adverse health effects. This paper argues that the absence of such regulation constitutes a violation of the right to health in Nigeria. It concludes by advocating for the Nigerian government to enact laws mandating energy drink manufacturers to include clear health warnings on their products.