International Courts And The African Woman Judge

A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

Lack of diversity within the judiciary has been identified as a legitimacy concern in domestic settings, and the last few years have seen increasing attention to this question at the international level. This book analyses the implications of identity and diversity across numerous international adjudicatory bodies.

An interdisciplinary introduction to international judges and their work

This book argues that we must look beyond the traditional criteria of compliance and effectiveness to judge the performance of Africa's international courts. It demonstrates how these courts are important venues for activists and opposition parties to wage political, social, environmental, and legal struggles on the international stage.

Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of gender and judging in African judiciaries. Employing different theoretical approaches, the book investigates how women have fared within domestic African judiciaries as both actors and litigants. It explores how women negotiate multiple hierarchies to access the judiciary, and how gender-related issues are handled in courts. The chapters in the book provide policy, theoretical and practical prescriptions to the challenges identified, and offer recommendations for the future directions of gender and judging in the post-COVID-19 era, including the role of technology, artificial intelligence, social media, and institutional transformations that can help promote women’s rights. Bringing together specific cases from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and covering a broad range of thematic reflections, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of African law, judicial politics, judicial training, and gender studies. It will also be useful to bilateral and multilateral donor institutions financing gender-sensitive judicial reform programs, particularly in Africa.

International courts are called upon to decide upon an increasingly wide range of issues of global importance, yet public knowledge of international judges and the process by which they are appointed remains very limited. Drawing on extensive empirical research, this book explains how the judges who sit on international courts are selected.

At the start of the twenty-first century the story of Africa's engagement with international law was one of marked commitment and meaningful contributions. Africa pioneered new areas of law and legal remedies, such as international criminal law and universal jurisdiction, and gave human rights jurisdiction to a number of new international courts. However, in recent years, African states have mobilised politically and collectively against the regional courts and the International Criminal Court, contesting these institutions' authority and legitimacy at national, regional and international levels. Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts provides the first comprehensive account of this important phenomenon, bringing together original fieldwork, empirical analysis and a critical overview of the diverse scholarship on both international and African regional courts. Moving beyond conventional explanations, Brett and Gissel use this remarkable research to show how the actions of African states should instead be seen as part of a growing desire for a more equal global order; a trend that not only has huge implications for Africa's international relations, but that could potentially change the entire practice of international law.

Intersectionality and Women's Access to Justice, edited by J. Jarpa Dawuni, propounds layered intersectionality as a paradigm for examining how gendered factors affect women's access to justice, whether as judges or litigants. Through intersectional and decolonial frameworks, the contributors analyze the lived experiences of women and their access to justice by situating the courtroom as both a spatial and a temporal arena for seeking justice (as litigants) and for seeking access to the bench (as judges). This book examines patterns of mutually reinforcing discriminatory practices that women share based on common gender identities and depending on which identities are at play at a given point in time in both traditional and statutory courts. The book provides recommendations for various justice sector providers.