Human rights NGOs and the rule of law in Africa

Abstract

African NGOs have created an awareness of the rule of law. These NGOs follow the Wiseberg-Scoble typology of documenting violent violations. There is a long relationship with European NGOs, as European NGOs opposed slavery. Yet, suspicion of foreign NGOs in Africa is based partIy on the history of colonialism and slavery, whose legacy continues. This was dramatized initially with the documentation of the Menguistu regime in Ethiopia’s mass murders. Africa has weaker human rights networks than for Latin America and Europe. At the end of the Cold War, the deterioration of the Postcolonial states dominated by one or two political forces has left a vacuum of Cold-War-era weapons; the great powers that provided those guns and polarized political confrontation, and contributed to their ungovernability, have retreated in their preference. More of the aid to African NGOs has come not from the US government but from the Ford Foundation and the Scandinavian, Dutch and German governments. The International Commission of Jurists paid attention to Africa in the 1960s and 1970s when other NGOs were not paying any attention. NGOs have not stopped the decline in the rule of law in Africa, though they may have reduced the decrease. They do not have the capability to press for prosecutions in regimes that do not prosecute and where patrimonialism inhibits the development of such institutions so that rulers exempt themselves through this solvent.