NATION-STATES AND UNIVERSAL RIGHTS AFTER INDEPENDENCE
After independence, new post-colonial states in Africa sought to claim for themselves the ability to determine what rights their citizens could have. As Meredith Terretta has recently shown, when, in 1965, Roger Baldwin of the International League of the Rights of Man tried to persuade the Tanzanian government to rethink its use of preventive detention laws, the Tanzanian response was to insist that while such laws had clearly been illegitimate when enacted by a colonial government, they were of a different nature when enacted by a post-colonial government which was itself an expression of the will of the people.[555]
But although post-colonial states sought to contain their citizens within their borders, those individuals continued to reach outside the state, often using a language of rights.
In Cameroon, the opposition activist Dr Marcel Bebey-Eyidi continued from prison his long-standing correspondence with Roger Baldwin. He lamented the fact that, because Cameroon was now no longer a Trusteeship Territory but an independent state, it was impossible for the United Nations to act ‘due to the principle of “non-interference”', even as ‘[t]he rights of man are completely violated in our country'.[556] And in Tanzania, where opposition became increasingly difficult in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, some of those who found themselves in detention appealed to new bodies like Amnesty International which increasingly sought to support individuals against their governments. The result was growing criticism of Julius Nyerere's use of preventive detention in Amnesty International reports over the course of the 1970s.[557]Anti-colonial activists had challenged colonial rule by reaching beyond the barriers which colonial governments sought to erect and appealing to a set of rights including, but not limited to, the right to choose one's own government, owed to all by virtue of their humanity. The same imaginative potential was open to citizens of post-colonial states too, and in this way the international continued to shape political imaginaries after independence. While African post-colonial states often closed down potential avenues for opposition, reaching outside the state could provide one way of attempting to challenge the actions of those states. But it also provided a way of challenging the claim that sovereignty meant that powers should lie exclusively at the level of the nationstate, and it is to this question that we now turn.
8.5
More on the topic NATION-STATES AND UNIVERSAL RIGHTS AFTER INDEPENDENCE:
- NATION-STATES AND REGIONAL ORDERS
- Empires, States and Nation
- 8.2 THE UNITED NATIONS, THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOVEREIGNTY
- THE (UNIVERSAL) CORPOREAL LANGUAGE OF PAIN
- EFFECTS OF EMPIRE AT THE CENTRE: GENDER AND NATION
- Acceptance that there simply are no transcendent, objective, mind-independent moral values would seem to bear on how one comprehends rights, more particularly moral or non-legal rights.
- The supremacy of Union law over the laws of the member states
- Regional States
- City-states
- CHAPTER 7 Warlords and States: A Contemporary Myth of the International System
- CHAPTER 11 The Powerful Myth of the International Community and the Imperative to Build States
- J) Bills of Rights
- The earliest political units deserving to be called states were France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, the countries composing the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia, and the Netherlands.
- From the Treaty of Maastricht to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights
- The European Court of Human Rights
- During his inaugural address as the fortieth president of the United States of America in January 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke of the ‘economic ills we [Americans] suffer that have come upon us over several decades’