Public Interest Litigation: A Critical Ingredient for Effective Human Rights Activism in Africa

Abstract

For many years, many lawyers have spent their lives working with and for many marginalized persons and communities in Africa; trying to assist them navigate the legal labyrinth that represents law in many African countries. Daily, the disadvantaged are confronted with the law; that is whether they like it or not. They do not ask to be illegally arrested by the police; they do not ask to be illegally dismissed from work; they do not ask for rigid and bureaucratic processes of securing a passport or a divorce; and they do not determine how the pension laws should operate – but all these represent their daily encounters with the law. Having inherited bureaucratic red tape from their colonial masters, many African states have in fact worsened these bureaucracies. Yet, as life must roll on within the bureaucratic state, many persons are denied rights, entitlements and services by the minute. Human rights lawyers spend most of their time trying to study and understand the laws that regulate “the system” and then invoke them in the service of those who are effectively screwed by “the system”. There are thousands of human rights initiatives on the continent, many of them legal services initiatives. In this paper, a summary of an ongoing investigation into legal aid and Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in Africa, I outline the fundamental fault lines on which human rights lawyers in Africa base their work and the problems they thereby run into. I also propose some initial rethinking of the assumptions that characterize their work and point to ways in which PIL could be useful in refining their strategies and scaling up their efforts.