After the election deadlock in Côte d'Ivoire, the international community recognized Ouattara as the winner of the elections, while the incumbent president, Gbagbo, also claimed victory. When they were both sworn in, violence ensued. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon stated that the international community had a responsibility to protect citizens. Thereafter, the UN, African Union and ECOWAS attempted to quell the violence through mediation and the threat of force. Gbagbo was eventually ousted by Ouattara's forces. This article examines the international community's responsibility to prevent and its actions in that regard. If democratization is a means to prevent mass atrocities, what was the nature of the international community's responsibility to Ivoirians to prevent conflict? What should be the international community's reaction to internal agitations for democracy? Some answers to these questions lie in the framework for the international community's responsibility to prevent the four crimes related to R2P.

Rapid population and urban growth in Africa pose severe challenges to development planning and management. This article argues that weak urban governance in Kenya results from the colonial legal order's shaping of urban form. Kenya's colonial laws, drawing from those in other British colonies (especially South Africa) and British statute law on local government, public health, housing and town planning, controlled African labour and movement, and Africans' relation to towns. These laws included ordinances on registration, “master and servant” and vagrancy, while detailed township rules enforced racial segregation and exclusion; the Feetham Commission (1926) led to a hierarchy of local authorities, with no African representation until the 1950s. The dual mandate ideology resulted in different land tenure in the white-settled areas and trust lands; the late introduction of individual land ownership in the trust lands created problems of peri-urban, unplanned development outside the old township boundaries.

Soon after the first democratic elections were organized in 2006, the Democratic Republic of Congo engaged in a series of juridical reforms to ensure that the judiciary is free from interference from the other branches of government: the legislature and the executive. Accordingly, Law No 06/020 of 2006 on the Status of Magistrates and Law No 08/013 of 2008 on the Organization and Functioning of the Supreme Council of the Judiciary were enacted. This article examines judicial independence in the Democratic Republic of Congo today, and assesses the impact of the newly adopted legislation by comparing it with the preceding statutory provisions on the functioning of the judiciary. Do the laws on the status of magistrates and on the organization and functioning of the supreme council of the judiciary, as recently enacted, effectively strengthen the independence of the judiciary?

This article examines the contribution of clans (kinship institutions) to the administration of justice within the context of standards set out in the African regional human rights instruments. Field work on the Jopadhola of Eastern Uganda is drawn upon, to explore how clans reproduce their notion of an independent court using an abridged legal doctrine of separation of powers, and partially mimicking lower level government and judicial features. The field work also shows how clans accommodate interests of women and youth. Even so, clans retain a largely customary approach to the appointment, qualifications and tenure of court officials. The main findings lead to the conclusion that, by applying an “African” notion of human rights, clans have created traditional constructs of an independent court: one that is culturally appropriate for their indigenous communities.

While for-profit companies regularly embark on non-profit activities, the converse issue has recently come to attention, namely whether non-profit companies may embark on profit-making activities. This has given rise to a confusing conundrum of practical importance, not only in South Africa but also in other jurisdictions. This article discusses whether non-profit companies, under the South African Companies Act of 2008, may have purely commercial objects. It also addresses the intertwined question of the contours of permissible profit-making activities. Since the non-profit company is the modern successor to the section 21 company under the previous Companies Act of 1973, this article considers the recent case of Cuninghame v First Ready Development 249, in which the Supreme Court of Appeal was faced with the problem of a section 21 company with a commercial object. The article also explores the administration of rental pool agreements by non-profit companies, which arose in the Cuninghame case.

This article examines the practice of the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice relating to the exhaustion of domestic remedies. It argues that the court is wrong to maintain the view that it is not bound by the doctrine, simply because the court's protocol is silent on the point. The author urges the court to reconsider its view in order to align its practice with prevailing customary international law and treaty trends on the exhaustion of domestic remedies in international suits espoused before international courts by or on behalf of individuals.

Cohabitation is left largely unregulated in South Africa, which means that many cohabitants are left destitute or financially worse off when their cohabiting partners die. The Pension Funds Act 24 of 1956, in particular section 37C, is one of the few pieces of legislation that afford legal protection to cohabitants who are left financially worse off due to the death of their partners. However, three previous pension funds adjudicators gave different views as to how to interpret this provision. This note seeks to compare three decisions by three different adjudicators and concludes that the latest decision in Hlathi is the most preferred, because it interprets section 37C progressively, taking into account the spirit, purport and objects of the Bill of Rights.