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Thousands of Cameroonian women played an essential role in the radically anti-colonial nationalist movement led by the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC): they were the women of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC). Drawing on women nationalistsí petitions to the United Nations, one of the largest collections of political documents written by African women during the decolonization era, as well as archival research and oral interviews, this work shows how UDEFEC transcended ethnic, class, education and social divides, and popularized nationalism in both urban and rural areas through the Trust Territories of the Cameroons under French and British administration. Foregrounding issues such as economic autonomy and biological and agricultural fertility, UDEFEC politics wove anti-imperial democracy and notions of universal human rights into locally rooted political cultures and histories. UDEFECís history sheds light on the essential components of womenís successful political mobilization in Africa, and contributes to the discussion of womenís involvement in nationalist movements in formerly colonized territories.

Abstract: This is the story of the Comité International de la Défense d'Ernest Ouandié (CIDEO), established in Paris 1970 to prevent the execution of Ernest Ouandié, commander of the underground liberation army in Cameroon. Comprised of lawyers, intellectuals, and clergy, the committee framed its defense of the African revolutionary in human rights terms, portraying the Cameroonian legal system as non-compliant with its constitutional commitment to human rights, and appealing globally for clemency once he was sentenced to death. CIDEO's human rights strategy shows the shifting relationship between violence and human rights in the era of decolonization, making visible the historical, political, and geographical contingencies within which human rights were revolutionary. This analysis of the committee's advocacy reveals that present-day definitional criteria of human rights have too often shaped the way their history is reconstructed.

This article analyzes the way that political actors, advocate lawyers, and European administrators leveraged the designations political prisoner, political refugee, and prohibited immigrant to claim rights for inhabitants of the UN trust territories of French Cameroon and British Cameroons in the 1950s. Incarcerated activists identified themselves as political prisoners as they claimed that their human rights were upheld by international legal norms outlined in UN documents such as the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Trusteeship Agreements, which bound administering authorities to uphold these principles. Having imposed politics onto the prison, Cameroonian nationalists who escaped repression in French Cameroon by fleeing to British territory politicized their exile as they claimed refugee status in British Cameroons, a territory they viewed as belonging to the nation they envisioned. In so doing, Cameroonian nationalists revealed embryonic refugee law to be more aspirational than universally applicable—but nonetheless laid claim to its protections in ways that did, in some cases, sway the courts. The focus on the legal cases of political prisoners and refugees shows how Cameroonian nationalists viewed the rights that international law established or promised as legitimizing their anti-colonial revolutionary state-building project. With the advocate lawyers who represented them, legally minded Cameroonian nationalists acted, defended, and claimed as though the trusteeship system had universalized a decolonized international law. Contributing to emerging scholarship on the relation of international law to global inequality in the decolonizing age, this article gives an account of a decolonizing worldmaking at the grassroots, where, through discrete legal cases, actors practiced articulating anti-colonial revolution with international law, contesting it and shaping it to their aspirations.

This article examines convergences and divergences between various expressions of communism, French republicanism, and pan-black solidarity in overseas France and among metropolitan communities of activists from the 1920s to the rise of the Popular Front against fascism in the mid-1930s. From the time of the first administrative reforms arising from France's official anti-communist colonial policies in 1922, until the formation of the Popular Front in 1936, anticolonial activism and anti-revolutionary policy dialectically produced sites of judicialization, with agitators deliberately harnessing legal processes to contest the policies, practices and politics of imperial France, and French officials variously legislating against protest, including by extra-parliamentary decree. Experiments in anti-revolutionary legislation culminated in 1935, when the French Minister of the Interior collaborated with the Minister of the Colonies and governors of overseas territories to legislate against 'acts of disorder or demonstrations against French sovereignty' whether committed by French citizens, subjects, or protected persons, and regardless of their location. By the early to mid-1930s, legalists on the French left – whether Marxist or republican and in large part due to their involvement with anticolonial activist groups in overseas France – viewed extra-parliamentary legislation and judicial irregularity in overseas France as a sign of increasingly authoritarian French governance. Many joined forces to mobilize against what some agitators described as fascist tendencies in French governance.

Cet article examine l'activité professionnelle et politique de de Félice au travers de la cause anti-Apartheid qu'il défendait, cause qui se situe à la fois au centre et aux marges de son activité professionnelle d'avocat. Au centre car l'analyse de son rôle de Secrétaire et ensuite Président du Comité français contre l'Apartheid de 1963 à 1975 nous permet de comprendre l'enchevêtrement des causes de l'avocat-défenseur dans celles de l'homme public. Aux marges car il s'agit d'un milieu géographique qu'il connaissait peu et qui en outre se situait fort loin de la conscience publique française.

During the 1950s, the African United Nations Trust Territories became pivotal sites where the human rights principles outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights played a complementary role to anticolonial nationalism. A transregional human rights network provided international support to African nationalists and rights activists, and the Trusteeship Agreements and the UN Charter that administering authorities had signed set the conditions for legally implementable human rights norms. But as the trusteeship system came to a close circa 1960, the UN no longer had the jurisdictional means to enforce rights principles, and the transatlantic network that activists throughout Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States had put in place began to disintegrate. In the 1960s, the human rights movement in the global North parted ways with liberation politics as it narrowly redefined human rights as negative protections for individuals. Yet, as this comparative analysis of human rights in Tanzania and Cameroon reveals, in some parts of (post)colonial Africa, particularly in the former UN trust territories where a 1950s-era conception of rights had become prevalent, human rights remained the expression of a political solidarity rooted in the liberatory practices of anticolonial struggle.

This article uses empirical evidence to engage recent scholarship on the historical place of human rights in decolonization. The case of the British and French Cameroons demonstrates that African nationalists and the Western anti-imperial human rights advocates who supported them viewed UN Trust Territories as the most politically and legally viable channel through which to address the human rights abuses particular to colonial rule. Yet, because of the political deformations arising out of decolonization, the transition to independence was accompanied by a widespread disappointment in the United Nations, the disintegration of collaborative, transregional activists' networks, and a withering away of human rights ideas.

Par leurs alliances avec des militants du RDA en Afrique française à partir de 1946, des avocats français de gauche ont déployé des stratégies juridiques pour poursuivre des objectifs anticoloniaux et nationalistes devant des tribunaux en AOF. Cet article se fonde sur des dossiers personnels, des archives officielles, et des compte-rendus des procès pour montrer comment ces stratégies de « cause lawyering » anticolonial ont façonné les procédures judiciaires et le débat public sur l'État de droit dans l'Union française entre 1946 et 1960. Les rapports entre avocats de gauche de la métropole et militants politiques africains illustrent les jeux d'échos par lesquels des idées concernant les libertés civiles et politiques, les droits de l'Homme et la politique ont voyagé entre France d'Outre-mer et métropole. L'exemple du Cameroun montre qu'au moment des indépendances, l'usage du droit était déjà détourné à des fins de répression politique.

What motivates "ordinary people" to support refugees emotionally and financially? This is a timely question considering the number of displaced people in today's world is at an all-time high. To help counter this crisis, it is imperative for the Canadian government to determine which policies encourage volunteers to welcome asylum seekers, and which ones must be reviewed. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Actions relates the story of the St. Joseph's Parish Refugee Outreach Committee over its thirty years in action, revealing how seemingly small decisions and actions have led to significant changes in policies and in people's lives—and how they can do so again in the future. By helping readers—young and old, secular and faith-oriented—understand what drives individuals and communities to welcome refugees with open hearts and open arms, the authors hope to inspire people across Canada and beyond its borders to strengthen our collective willingness and ability to offer refuge as a lifesaving protection for those who need it.