World Bank

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), is a coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Convened by Afronomicslaw.org with the support of Open Society for Southern Africa, (OSISA), the AfSDJN's activities are tailored around addressing the threats that sovereign debt poses for economic development, social cohesion and human rights in Africa. It advocates for debt cancellation, rescheduling and restructuring as well as increasing the accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), is a coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Convened by Afronomicslaw.org with the support of Open Society for Southern Africa, (OSISA), the AfSDJN's activities are tailored around addressing the threats that sovereign debt poses for economic development, social cohesion and human rights in Africa. It advocates for debt cancellation, rescheduling and restructuring as well as increasing the accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

While Ghana has completed three major debt restructuring operations comprising of domestic debt restructuring, external bilateral debt restructuring, and commercial bondholders debt restructuring, Ghana’s economy is unable to take any more uncertainty with regards to whether the terms of the MoU agreement and the $13 billion agreement in principle are official and agreed to.

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.

In the early days of investment treaty awards, twenty or so years ago, it was obvious something was badly amiss. With virtually no legal analysis, the Metalclad tribunal found an indirect expropriation against Mexico based on the government’s refusal to authorize a landfill in a historically polluted area. A few years later, foreign asset owners busily sued Argentina for the country’s emergency measures, adopted in the face of a national economic crisis; the arbitrators were unsympathetic to the Argentine lawyers’ argument that it was ‘necessary’ for the country’s government to override the stipulated water rates in contracts with irresponsibly privatized utilities so households could afford drinking and bathing during the crisis and recovery. In CME, a case against the Czech Republic, the tribunal awarded hundreds of millions to a U.S. mogul after reasoning very erratically that the country had violated most of the cryptic investor protections in the invoked treaty. The dispute arose from Czech efforts to regulate broadcasting of cheap American re-runs on a major privatize TV station that was filling the airwaves with profitable muck. A sister tribunal in Lauder, bizarrely hearing a parallel claim by the human owner of the CME company, refused to award any compensation for the same dispute.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), is a coalition of citizens, scholars, civil society actors and church groups committed to exposing the adverse impact of unsustainable levels of African sovereign debt on the lives of ordinary citizens. Convened by Afronomicslaw.org with the support of Open Society for Southern Africa, (OSISA), the AfSDJN's activities are tailored around addressing the threats that sovereign debt poses for economic development, social cohesion and human rights in Africa. It advocates for debt cancellation, rescheduling and restructuring as well as increasing the accountability and responsibility of lenders and African governments about how sovereign debt is procured, spent and repaid.