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The Concept of Legitimate Governance in the Contemporary International Legal System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2009

Obiora Chinedu Okafor
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The scourge of illegitimate governance in its many forms is, and always has been, globally endemic, constituting, in a contemporary sense, the single most important impoverishing and destabilising element in our ‘global neighbourhood’. If, in the view of nations, the major mandates of the law and common institutions of nations, as expressed in the Charter of the United Nations, are to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, to maintain international peace and security, and to be a centre for the harmonisation of the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends, then it is pertinent that international legal scholarship cast and maintain its powerful gaze upon this intensely pernicious phenomenon. It is also important that such scholarly enterprise be directed at the elucidation of the existing international regulatory framework for the control and perhaps elimination of such conduct; as well as at the construction of such a paradigm where none already exists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Netherlands International Law Review , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , May 1997 , pp. 33 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © T.M.C. Asser Press 1997

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Footnotes

*

Lecturer, Department of International Law and Jurisprudence, University of Nigeria. Currently an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The author wishes to thank Professors IvanL. Head, OC, QC, Karin Mickelson, and Joel C. Bakan for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References

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91. African Charter, Art. 24, supra n. 87.

92. See the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, December 16, 1966, reprinted in 6 ILM (1967) p. 360 (hereinafter ‘ICESCR’).

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