In many African countries, the protection and promotion of human rights is enshrined in national laws including domestic constitutions, policies, and guidelines. Many African countries are signatories to a plethora of conventions on human rights including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. However, in several African countries, ordinarily, socio-economic rights are not enforceable because socio-economic rights are not explicitly provided in many national constitutions. Furthermore, right to research as an evolutive and burgeoning framework in the African copyright system adds to this mix. Scholars including Okorie have advocated for the development of the right to research as a complete or explicit defence to copyright infractions or as user rights. However, the development of an explicit right to research in the African copyright context is afflicted with a plethora of obstacles. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has further restricted access to information and academic materials especially in digital formats and furthermore, many African libraries and institutions are ill-equipped to perform their role of enabling access to information. Hence, this recent book – The Right to Research in Africa: Exploring the Copyright and Human Rights Interface by Desmond Oriakhogba is an important and innovative addition to this debate. Oriakhogba argues for a reconceptualization of the African copyright system from explicit human rights law perspectives as means of localising the right to research in the African context.

In different epochs of our world, the idea of copyright has been thought about and debated by different scholars and philosophers. Most commonly, such debates find resonance in scholarly interlocutory about intellectual property law justificatory theories. On limited occasions, copyright scholarship ventures into studying the jurisprudence of copyright, that is the consciousness and the conscience of the discipline. In his offering, The Right to Research in Africa: Exploring the Copyright and Human Rights Interface, Oriakhogba remarkably studies copyright in the context of Human Rights. From the onset, it is refreshing that Oriakhogba takes the task of engaging copyright outside of the strict positivist and largely mercantilist strictures that often insist on thinking about copyright purely within the ambit of trade. The book’s argument is propounded in five chapters. Following the introduction, the second chapter examines the state of research in Africa, and the challenge that copyright poses to the question of access to information. The third chapter places its focus on international and regional human rights framework. The fourth chapter, which is the focus of this essay, discusses the national constitutions and frameworks for the protection of human rights to ascertain whether they support the development of the right to research. The fifth chapter, which concludes the book, summarily uses the insights from prior chapter’s to substantively respond to the question whether the right to research is justifiable in the context of Africa.

The Right to Research in Africa: Exploring the Interface between Copyright and Human Rights, a book authored by Desmond Oriakhogba, was published by Springer Nature in 2023. The book examined international and regional human rights instruments to which African countries have subscribed, as well as those relevant to the African context, and the national bills of rights and constitutions in Africa with the aim of constructing an explicit right to research in Africa.

The Fourth Biennial Conference of the South Asian International Economic Law Network (SAIELN) will take place on 16th - 18th December 2024 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in collaboration with the Open University of Sri Lanka.

With the recent decision by the African Heads of States to adopt the Protocol on Investment to the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area, Dr Dominic Dagbanja’s monograph on The Investment Treaty Regime and Public interest in Africa is a welcome addition to the growing list of monographs on Africa’s foreign investment law regimes. This book which is a based on Dr Dagbanja’s 2015 doctoral dissertation provides an original contribution to existing literature by focusing on the constitutionality of investment treaties. It deals with themes and issues which are critical for understanding Africa’s complex foreign investment protection and promotion laws. Although scholars have examined the linkages between constitutional law and international investment law notably using case studies from Europe and Latin America, this is the first monograph to focus on this issue from an African perspective.

I immensely enjoyed reading Dr. Mbori’s piece in Afronomicslaw titled ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Kenyan Supreme Court Shooting is own Foot on Merits Review and Appellate Jurisdiction in Continuing Supremacy Battle with the East Africa Court of Justice (EACJ). I now have the pleasure of partially disagreeing with him particularly on whether the EACJ has (merit) review jurisdiction over national laws. This comment is not an attempt at exhaustively analysing the Supreme Court Advisory Opinion in Reference No. E001 of 2022. I found that Advisory Opinion to be surface-level, a bit incoherent and internally inconsistent, and devoid of adequate reasoning. As such, I refrain from commenting on other key issues in the Advisory Opinion. Some of those issues are: how the Court determined that it has jurisdiction to issue the opinion; the relationship between international and municipal law; the Court’s repeated failure to distinguish sources of international law and their interaction with municipal law; the court’s (misplaced) discussion on subsidiarity and margin of appreciation, and the apportionment of interpretation and application functions between the EACJ and domestic courts. Rather, my comment is restricted to the question of whether the EACJ has (merit) review jurisdiction over national laws, which the Supreme Court answered in the negative and which Dr. Mbori answers in the affirmative. I partially disagree with both the Supreme Court and Dr. Mbori, but for different albeit related reasons.

The case filed by Afronomicslaw with Wanjiru Gikonyo as Applicant is brought under Article 30 of the EAC Treaty. Article 30 of the EAC Treaty allows individuals and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) who are residents of the community to bring cases against partner states of the EAC where these partner states violate the law.