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Asserting Permanent Sovereignty Over Ancestral Lands: The Bakweri Land Litigation Against Cameroon, Ndiva Kofele-Kale

Annual Survey of International & Comparative Law

The Article focuses on the recently concluded Bakweri land case against Cameroon in the African Human Rights Commission. The Article uses this litigation as the basis for a re-examination of a host of issues relating to the enforcement of human rights, especially land rights, in postcolonial countries making the slow transition from single-party authoritarian rule to multi-party democratic states. More importantly, it takes a fresh look at the exhaustion of local remedies rule. It asks the relatively simple question: whether an indigenous people seeking to reclaim and assert permanent sovereignty over ancestral lands, forcibly expropriated from them during the period …