Can international actors play a meaningful role in ensuring human rights or in building a stable constitutional democracy?
In many ways, the two speakers, Abduletif Kedir Idris and Abadir M. Ibrahim, spent their careers answering this question in the affirmative in their human rights advocacy in Ethiopia. After their country embarked on what many saw as a transition to democracy in 2018, they joined a group of about 200 Ethiopians, mostly lawyers and legal academics who formed the Legal and Justice Affairs Advisory Council, to take on the task of overhauling the entire legal system. In their presentation, based on a book manuscript on the reform process, they will contend that while international actors can play a determinative role, the mechanism through which they do so is only tangentially connected with how well democracy, human rights, or rule of law, projects are designed. Emphasizing the need to avoid “mixing spices without a recipe”, they will discuss some generalizable lessons from Ethiopia.
The respondent, Ada Ordor, a leading expert, and educator, in the field of law and development and has studied and written on the application of this field in Africa, as well as in connection with women’s rights and the nonprofit sector.
The discussion will be moderated by Salma Waheedi, Lecturer on Law and Executive Director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World.
Panelists
Ada Ordor, Ph.D., who was the Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights at HLS in the Spring of 2024, is a professor of law and director of the Centre for Comparative Law in Africa at the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town (UCT). Her work explores issues of law and development from various perspectives that demonstrate the interconnectedness of development processes and the laws that govern them. She has held academic positions at the Nigerian Law School, and visiting research positions at the African Gender Institute, at UCT, and at the Center for Civil Society Studies, at Johns Hopkins University.
Abduletif Kedir Idris is a Ph.D. candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and a lecturer at the Center for Human Rights at Addis Ababa University. His research interest areas include intercultural human rights, environmental and indigenous people’s rights, comparative constitutional and administrative law, federalism, and multilevel governance. Abduletif holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Addis Ababa University and a master’s degree in law from the University of Alabama.
Abadir M. Ibrahim, J.S.D., is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. His current research focuses on African approaches to human rights which studies, among other things, the iteration and practice of human rights as impacted by Africa’s (post)colonial, religious and traditional heritages. He is the co-editor of Between Failure and Redemption: The Future of the Ethiopian Social Contract (Northwestern Univ., 2022) and Righting Human Rights through Legal Reform: Ethiopia’s Contemporary Experience (Addis Ababa Univ., 2020).
This event is organized by the Human Rights Program and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, and cosponsored by the Harvard African Law Association, HLS Advocates for Human Rights, and the Harvard Human Rights Journal.