The Ecowas Court, Activist Forces, and the Pursuit of Environmental and Socioeconomic Justice in Nigeria

Abstract

The thesis has two objectives. The first (and central) objective is to examine the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS Court (a sub-regional international court in West Africa), and its role within the West African region, especially how the Court has served as a resource for the Activist Forces that operate in the sub-region, in their pursuit of Environmental and Socioeconomic Justice in Nigeria. The second goal of this thesis, which is ancillary to the first, is to investigate the Court’s jurisprudence in three landmark cases: SERAP v. Nigeria & Anor (2010); SERAP v. Nigeria & 8 Ors (2012); and SERAP & 10 Ors v. Nigeria & 4 Ors (2014). The purpose of these case studies is to advance the first thesis objective by analyzing how the ECOWAS Court has advanced the justiciability of environmental and socioeconomic rights despite domestic limitations. This is significant for poor and marginalized populations e.g. those in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where natural resource extraction has for decades been largely unfavorable to the wellbeing and development of the people. This thesis contributes to the legal literature on human rights systems in Africa by analyzing how the norms, processes and creative spaces made available by the ECOWAS Court has contributed to the struggles waged by local activist forces in Nigeria. In the process of developing this analysis, it deploys theories propounded by several quasi-constructivists, particularly Okafor’s theory of “correspondence”, a unique model for estimating the extent of the “internalization” of human rights norms without abandoning the regular “compliance” model for assessing the fulfillment by states of their international human rights law obligations.