René Lefort, director of the UNESCO Courier
Mathieu Kérékou, democratically elected president of Benin in 1996. He was required by the country’s constitutional court to retake the oath of office after leaving out several words during the first ceremony.
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Laws change less rapidly than customs; they are dangerous when they lag behind customs and even more so when they claim to precede them. Marguerite
Yourcenar |
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Benin: Area: 113,000 km2
in the form of a 700-km-long strip of land; 51 people per km2. Source: World Bank |
The law
is paramount in Benin, but the courts and the police are still not enforcing it effectively
‘Twenty-five
thieves burned alive in Benin by vigilante groups,” read the headline on a recent
news agency story. After a spate of robberies and rapes, the thieves, mostly immigrants,
were publicly burned to death in the southeastern province of Couffo in August. The
government sent troops to beef up the local police, but lynch law is spreading and
replacing police work and the judicial process.
Yet the U.S. State Department and human rights organizations both within and outside
Benin say the country has become “a constitutional democracy” and “is now living
under the rule of law”. Benin is held up as an example in sub-Saharan Africa, where
“the wind of democracy” that blew in the early 1990s is otherwise dying down.
Benin is ahead of the pack, says Maurice Glele Ahanhanzo, a member of the country’s
constitutional court, because legal principles are now so deeply rooted in the population
that “they have become the main instrument for regulating life in society”. However,
the Beninese can see that these principles are still very far from being effectively
applied, even by the courts. They draw their own conclusions, all too often by taking
the law into their own hands.
Benin’s “democratic revival” is home-grown–it hasn’t been copied from elsewhere.
Unlike the situation in many other French-speaking African states, it does not stem
from the loss of a powerful ally after the Berlin Wall came down. Nor is it the result
of pressure following France’s decision, announced by President François Mitterrand
in a speech to francophone African leaders in June 1990, to make aid to African countries
conditional upon their progress towards democracy. If there has been any outside
influence, it has come from the foreign aid agencies whose intervention became indispensable
because of Benin’s rundown economy.
The “democratic revival” is above all the result of a dynamic process within Beninese
society that was triggered by the rejection of 17 years of “Marxist-Leninist” dictatorship.
The old regime’s death knell was sounded in February 1990 by a conference, the first
of its kind in Africa, that brought together the “dynamic forces of the nation”.
A constitution adopted a few months later was “in its entirety devised, sought for
and drafted by the people of Benin,” says Ahanhanzo. It started by “affirming the
deep-rooted opposition” of the Beninese people to the previous regime’s legal violations
and other failings.
A counterweight
to the authorities
Another factor lies
in the prestigious history of Benin, previously known as Dahomey, and the nostalgia
it gives rise to. The educational system was much better than elsewhere. The country
was a seedplot of intellectuals and earned the nickname “the Latin Quarter of Africa”
after the famous Paris student district. Its “graduates” staffed colonial administrative
services all over West Africa. The remarkable “democratic revival” fits into a long
history that Beninese are very proud of. The preamble to the constitution states
that Beninese want to “once more be the pioneers of democracy and the defenders of
human rights that we were until quite recently.”
The constitution devotes 33 articles to a detailed exposition of all basic rights,
as if its authors had wanted to cover all the authoritarian practices the country
had experienced. The articles set forth political, civil, economic and social rights,
including a “right to development” in all its forms. Above all, the document makes
the constitutional court the keystone of the new rule of law. The court is empowered
to give an opinion, when requested to do so, on any prospective laws or regulations
which might infringe human rights. Even more important, it can also, on its own initiative,
pass judgment on such laws or regulations after they have been adopted. What’s more,
any citizen can bring a suit of this nature before the court without paying a fee.
This facility, which does not exist in the world’s old, most entrenched democracies,
is widely used. Around a third of the court’s 468 decisions up to the end of 1998
concerned human rights violations. Some other decisions have been widely trumpeted.
The court’s seven judges annulled the election of the wife of the country’s first
democratically-elected president, Nicéphore Soglo, as a parliamentary deputy.
They also forced his successor, former dictator Mathieu Kérékou, who
was democratically elected in March 1996, to re-take his oath of office because he
had “omitted” several words the first time round.
The court has become the main counterweight to the authorities because of its wide
powers and the extremely independent way it has used them. Its integrity is unquestioned.
According to a recent survey1 it is the country’s best-known institution and, for
94 per cent of those polled, the one they trust most.
Totally different opinions were expressed about the police and the other courts,
however. All those polled felt that “a policeman can wield complete power over you
at the drop of a hat”. Arbitrary arrests, unauthorized searches, brutal detention
in custody for longer than the maximum legal period are common, and prison conditions
are inhuman. Ninety-two per cent of those who took part in the survey said they had
no confidence in the legal system because it was corrupt and too slow.
“There’s a two-speed approach to civil liberties,” says Julien Togbadja, head of
Benin’s Human Rights League. “At the top you’ve got tremendous freedom; at the bottom,
massive violations.” Ninety-four per cent of those polled said “powerful people often
intervene to halt or pervert the course of justice.”
The judges have some solid arguments on their side, starting with their extremely
inadequate facilities and pay. The first computers, for example, have only just arrived–as
a gift. Justice gets a normal share of the national budget (1.6 per cent in 1999)
but the country has only 144 judges (one for every 8,000 citizens), a fifth of the
figure in industrialized countries. Given their meagre salaries ranging from $200
to $600 a month gross, heroic efforts are needed to resist bribery.
For ordinary citizens, justice is remote. The only court of appeal sits in the capital
and 90 per cent of the population neither speak nor read French, the only language
used in law books and trials. In principle, legal fees don’t exist, but the courts
are increasingly asking those involved to contribute to their costs. Also, for cultural
reasons, lawsuits create hatred and bitterness which endure for generations. As a
result, Beninese go in for extra-legal “arrangements” and at worst resort to lynching.
Democratic
revival
But they still want
the law to be more widely applied. “Civil society is very active in the face of the
authorities’ many attempts to curb freedoms,” says Togbadja. The impetus for this
mobilization comes from the independent media (about 10 newspapers, a dozen radio
stations and four television channels), human rights NGOs (no less than 100 of them),
the churches and, says Togbadja, “a handful” of politicians. This is because “the
political class grew up under the old totalitarian regime,” says Virgile Akpovo of
the Human Rights Institute.
The democratic revival is going strong, chorus Benin’s human rights campaigners.
They are particularly happy about the start of a programme to modernize the legal
system and improve prison conditions, as well as to apply a constitutional clause
that says human rights must be taught in schools and even in the armed forces.
But the activists also firmly agree that the movement is fragile and that the main
threat comes not from people’s attitudes or from laws or institutions, but from underdevelopment.
Social and economic rights are virtually a dead letter because of widespread corruption
and impoverishment.
In addition, says Ahanhanzo, “there can be no rule of law without a state.” He criticizes
liberalization and structural adjustment policies, and asks “how can anyone think
of downsizing a state which is already in poor shape?” As Senegalese President Abdou
Diouf likes to point out, “hunger is incompatible with democracy,” because it means
people “can’t play their part as citizens.”