Fostering Democratic Resilience: the Role of Internationalized Constitutional Adjudication in Africa

The thesis aims to identify meaningful correlations between the internationalization of constitutional adjudication in Africa and the resilience of democracies towards instances of constitutional retrogression. That is, it wants to assess whether the use of foreign material for constitutional interpretation may facilitate constitutional courts invalidating undemocratic legislation, thereby strengthening democracies against potential setbacks. At first, both processes of internationalization of constitutional adjudication and democratic decay are examined, with due regard to their relevance and application within the African continent. On the one hand attention is paid to a classification of African constitutions according to their level of internationalization, and to instances of judicial cross-fertilization. On the other, the focus is on trends of constitutional retrogression, concentrating on the ways constitutional amendments and ordinary legislations may undermine the democratic system. The work goes on engaging in an in-depth analysis of African constitutional case-law in a comparative perspective. Said analysis, along with some structural considerations, ultimately links the adoption of a more internationalized approach to constitutional adjudication with increased resilience of pluralistic societies against democratic decay.