Righting Wrongs
Issue No 5 - November 2012

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- From the Editorial of the Newsletter

Serve well, not long
Horace Adjolohoun (Benin, 2007)
Alumni Coordinator

I cannot avoid drawing your attention to my recent experience about the shame that some of our leaders in Africa still attract on us.

It was indeed with shame but however with hope that I had to watch an international televised interview of an African head of state in full. The interview was on an international English speaking channel, known to be the leader of information in the Americas and the rest of the world, and the head of state is the president of an oil-rich central African country, who has recently wanted a famous prize be named after him for funding.

I beg you to watch that interview, which has certainly been posted on the internet. The most shameful part of the interview was that the female western journalist ridiculed the president by having him admit loudly that he does not know who Aung San Suu Kyi is.

The other degrading moment was when the 33-year world’s longest serving head of state named former South African President Nelson Mandela as his hero in politics. My hope is that the new generation of leaders nurtured by the LLM HRDA programme, many of whom are already in top official positions in various institutions, represents an alternative to African leaders of the stature described above. For your information, kindly view the video below.


For those of us who are in the academia, I would like to share my relative disappointment about the still fair level of knowledge of the African human rights system among young law graduates in our universities. As I marked some memorials and attended oral pleadings of some teams during the 21st African Human Rights Moot Court Competition that just took place in Maputo, Mozambique, I noticed a lack of knowledge of the African human rights system, of its law and jurisprudence.