Analysis

Supporting moot court competition through funding initiatives is one way to offer support. Another way is to offer knowledge and expertise on substantive law as well as presentation skills.

This symposium presents two interesting memoirs of African students who have participated in these moots and have chosen paths of graduate studies that are related to international economic law and development studies. Mr Mishael Wambua a student at Strathmore University Law and last year winner and best oralist at the John H. Jackson writes about his experience and advice to future mooters. Ms Purity Maritim a former participant of the same moot and now a masters student at the Graduate Institute in Geneva also writes about her experiences and what she learnt from the moot. The other two contributions are from Mr Christian Campbell the Assistant Director FDI moot and Tsotang Tsietsi lecturer and moot coach from the National University of Lesotho. These two contributions present two interesting perspectives on the many directions that moot court competitions can take for Africa in the near future.

Given the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the present need for online educational materials and resources, the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law (AVL) is happy to draw our attention to their free online educational resources. 

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) is issuing a worldwide call for papers for an Agora symposium to be published in the October 2020 issue of the Journal.  The topic – “The International Legal Order and the Global Pandemic” – recognizes that the present crisis raises foundational questions for the international legal order that extend beyond the immediate challenges to public health and economic stability.

In this brief post, I want to make sense of Prabhash Ranjan’s brief critique of TWAIL perspectives on international investment law. My main aim is not to mount a defense of TWAIL project(s) on investment law because that might be done more eloquently by others. Instead, I want to make some brief comments about the political valence of, and the assumptions behind, the reservations that Professor Ranjan articulated in this post, and which also appear in his recent book on India and Bilateral Investment Treaties.

It is trite to mention that the benefits and costs from trade expansion may never be evenly distributed across ACs. However, the estimated revenue loss should not be considered as an absolute loss for ACs as the long-term benefits, facilitated by adjustment support remain significant. It will allow comparative advantage to thrive, thereby granting customers and firms access to cheaper products/raw materials in the continent.

States could rely on secondary rules on State responsibility to defend preventative measures relating to COVID-19, yet their successful invocation depends on satisfying several conditions set out in the ILC’s Draft Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this post. Meanwhile, the applicability of the doctrine of margin of appreciation, developed by the European Court of Human Rights, to the claims arising under BITs has been accepted, justifying why investment tribunals should pay deference to governmental judgments of national requirements in the protection of public health when the “discretionary exercise of sovereign power, [is] not made irrationally and not exercised in bad faith”

Nigeria, similarly, must now contend with a whole range of issues discussed at the CLRNN. These issues demand attention in order to advance objectives of furthering social and economic development. Reducing legal uncertainty and unleashing the power of Nigerian enterprise to more efficiently tackle its’ own challenges is a matter of the highest concern; in this way Nigeria can genuinely become the economic powerhouse it seeks to be, for Africa, and the world.

While the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations (NOTN) 2017 Nigerian Annual Trade Policy Report (NAPTOR) was an excellent step in the right direction, it is not enough. As such, in the spirit of the legal reform proposals that the CLRNN inaugural conference demanded, I urge the Nigeria government to develop and adopt a coherent and robust regional trade policy that will be updated from time to time to reflect the realities of the day.

Under the imperialism approach transplanted commercial laws especially from countries receiving these laws from their colonial or other western metropolitan centers are viewed as aimed at securing the immediate and future commercial interests of the colonial/metropolitan empire and not the interests of the peoples of the receiving countries.