Why am I passionate about this?
Following my PhD at King’s College, Cambridge I was invited by the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London to serve as an Honorary Research Fellow. This enabled me to focus fully on 15 years of research into previously untapped archives and interviews with more than twenty-five politicians and jurists active in the process of the African human rights charter. By coincidence, thirty-five years or so ago, in an earlier incarnation, I was also responsible for editing the first public debt prospectus for the African Development Bank in Abidjan.
Nat's book list on the intelligent person’s guide to human rights
Why did Nat love this book?
This is the first book, following the opening of the archives thirty years after independence, to examine how bills of rights came to be incorporated into the independence constitutions of Britain’s former colonial territories.
It shows why and how, after the unfortunate political experience of an independent Ghana under Nkrumah, the Colonial Office foisted bills of rights on the independence constitutions of its colonial territories. A case of British do as I say and not as I do.
1 author picked Bills of Rights and Decolonization as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Bills of Rights and Decolonization analyzes the British Government's radical change in policy during the late 1950s on the use of bills of rights in colonial territories nearing independence. More broadly it explores the political dimensions of securing the protection of human rights at independence and the peaceful transfer of power through constitutional means.
This book fills a major gap in the literature on British and Commonwealth law, history, and politics by documenting how bills of rights became commonplace in Britain's former overseas territories. It provides a detailed empirical account of the origins of the bills of rights in Britain's…