Anglo-African Perspectives on Self-Defence

Abstract

Forty-eight years ago, the London Conference on ‘The Future of Law in Africa’ agreed that there should be a general set of criminal laws to be universally applied to all African nations. Unfortunately, no progress whatsoever has been made towards achieving this long-term objective. Lately, a fresh impetus for doing so has come from another quarter, namely, the enactment of the Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2002 (hereinafter called the ‘ICC Statute’) which was the culmination of the Rome Conference convened to establish such a court. As a result of the ICC Statute, a permanent international criminal court composed of judges who are independent of their home states, was created for the first time in history, to try perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes and aggression. The ICC Statute contains provisions spelling out some of the general principles of criminal responsibility. This development is of special significance to African nations because many of them have ratified the Statute. Moreover, at the time of writing, all the cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC) involve African nationals. Consequently, the ICC Statute is an important source of law which African lawmakers (both legislators and judges) should take cognisance of in evaluating the current state of their criminal laws. Among the general principles of criminal responsibility embodied in the ICC Statute is a provision rendering a person not criminally liable who had performed the incriminating conduct in defence of the person against an assailant, commonly described as ‘self-defence’. This includes acting in defence of oneself as well as of another person. Furthermore, the ICC provision includes the right of defence