Most countries on the African continent have ratified or acceded to several human rights treaties, including the Torture Convention and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. This book assesses the progress African countries have made in institutionalizing human rights laws prohibiting torture, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances domestically. States ratify human rights treaties for a variety of reasons. Some commentators defend an honest sincerity of purpose, whereas others might point to material incentives. The contributors to this volume go beyond the ratification puzzle to instead reframe legalization according to Lon Fuller’s conceptualization of congruence. Congruence is an interactive variable that measures the continuous efforts of government and the public to shape the law and its implementation. By reframing legalization as an ongoing process, the model created by the authors is used to test several hypotheses about what impacts legalization in Africa more
