Righting the wrongs: Justice Clever Mule Musumali’s legacy of judicial activism revisited

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue XII, December 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186

Righting the wrongs: Justice Clever Mule Musumali’s legacy of judicial activism revisited

Mumba Malila ⃰

1. Introduction

Many judiciaries in Africa have been carped for their allegedly complicit role in the violation of constitutions and the undermining of the rule of law in the post-independence state. In this connection, an African human rights lawyer once lamented that:

[t]he judiciaries in common law African countries must take substantial responsibility for the collapse of constitutional government …. The judiciary in many of these countries deliberately and knowingly abdicated its constitutional role to protect human rights and, in many cases, actively connived in the subversion of constitutional rule and constitutional rights by the executive arm of government.

Whether one agrees with this sentiment or not, it is,to many judges, a sobering indictment. It is undeniable that, perhaps with the general exception of the Kenyan, Malawian and South African judiciaries, which have consistently acquitted themselvesfairly well and with remarkable decency too,especially in recent times, many judiciaries in the African region are still reeling from the devastating effects of political intimidation that has undermined their confidence to check on executive excesses and the blatant disregard of the rule of law. They are reproachable, not because they lack the intellectual equipment

⃰ LLB (Zambia), LLM (Cambridge), LLM (Cumbria), LLD (Pretoria), Cert Hum Rgts (Strasbourg) MCI Arb (London); former Chairperson of the Zambian Human Rights Commission; former Attorney General of Zambia; former Vice Chairperson of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights; currently Judge of the Supreme Court of Zambia. The views expressed in this paper are the author’s personal opinions and do not reflect those of any institution the author is or was associated with
Chidi A. Odinkalu, The Judiciary and the Legal Protection of Human Rights in Common Law Africa: Allocating Responsibility for the Failure of Post-Independence Bills of Rights, 8 Afr. Soc. Int’l& Comp. L. Proc. 124, 124 (1996)

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