The danger of the single legal story: the effects of international human rights legalization on land issues in Africa

Matsinhe, David Mário

The danger of the single legal story: the effects of international human rights legalization on land issues in Africa

Thesis / Dissertation

2024

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Public Law

Faculty

Faculty of Law

Abstract

The order of ideas herein presented constitutes a decolonial critique of the constraints inherent in international human rights law, upheld as the gold standard for safeguarding the rights of rural communities in the context of resource extraction within the African landscape. The objective is to render visible the constraints imposed by international human rights law on the capacity of international human rights organizations to advocate for the interests of African communities facing the adverse human rights implications of reckless corporate extractive operations. The exercise is based on an analysis of reports on resource extraction and human rights in Africa issued by prominent international human rights organizations, specifically Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. This analysis locates these limitations within the coloniality of international human rights law, pursuant to the process of human rights legalization. For in practice, the legalization process has gradually and progressively reduced human rights into a monodisciplinary legal domain in which the multidisciplinary ode to human rights has been silenced. Whether intended or unintended, the multidimensional human rights story gave way to the prevailing single human rights story, within which human rights are knowable and visible in ways that matter only through the eyes of the law. As an instrument of coloniality, the legalization process has dismantled the intricate, decentralized, and all-encompassing global human rights rhizome, relegating it to historical obsolescence, and in its place, constructed the prevailing hierarchical, unitary, centralized, and exclusionary arboreal edifice of 2 international legal human rights. This reduction of human rights to a one dimensional legal framework has effectively silenced numerous indigenous voices globally, notably those originating from the global south. The prevailing arboreal paradigm must yield ground, allowing for the resurgence of a rhizomatic framework as the more equitable, tenable, decolonial approach.

Keywords

public law

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