ANU Africa Network

Mariana Llanos

Thursday 10 March 2016, 12:00 – 2:00 pm

L.J. Hume Centre, Copland Building (24), 1st Floor, Room 1171, Australian National University

Lunch will be provided at the seminar after the Q&A session.

Abstract: This presentation summarizes the main results of the project “Judicial (In)dependence in New Democracies Courts, Presidents and Legislatures in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa” (SAW, 2011-2015). A starting point in our analysis was the unbalance of power between strong executives / elected power holders, and weak courts, a feature that is common to many new democracies in our regions. The project focused on three potential ways in which elected power holders can affect court independence. The first one concerns how insulated courts are in the constitutional design from political influence, and what their formal powers are. To assess this aspect we constructed an index of formal judicial independence, which was used in Stroh and Heyl (2015) to analyze the creation of West African Constitutional Courts. The second concerns the opposite extreme, that is, the purely informal invasions by power holders to which courts are exposed. The project developed a concept of informal interference and an empirical strategy for its study (Llanos et al, 2015). An “intermediate” path is represented by pseudo-legal actions or actions of transgression of the formal rules of judicial independence. In this respect, we studied the principle of judicial stability, that is, how often and why unlawful dismissals of judges occur in practice. This is the subject of analysis in Llanos et al (in progress). The presentation concludes with remarks on the challenges faced, and the lessons learnt, with this cross-regional research exercise.

Mariana Llanos is a Lead Research Fellow at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, Germany.

Enquiries
Marija Taflaga: marija.taflaga@anu.edu.au

ANU School of Politics & International Relations
________________________________________SPIR Seminar Series

Kenya’s 2007 elections – what went wrong, and why?

Jorgen Elklit
Aarhus University

Thursday 3 March 2016, 12:00 – 2:00 pm

L.J. Hume Centre, Copland Building (24), 1st Floor, Room 1171

Lunch will be provided at the seminar after the Q&A session.

Abstract
International organisations play many different roles during election processes in new and emerging democracies (and in countries hoping to be seen as democracies). These roles—and their impact—become particularly interesting during situations that develop into ‘an electoral crisis’. An electoral crisis is some kind of humanitarian or political (or other) crisis, where administrative or other problems in relation to an electoral process function as the trigger of the crisis. Many such crises have occurred over recent years, but this presentation will focus on the Kenyan case of 2007–08. The tragic violence and ethnic cleansing shocked the world during early 2008. The instrument established jointly by the government of Kenya and international organisations to investigate what went wrong and what should be done to remedy the situation was IREC, the Independent Review Commission. The article demonstrates how international organisations were involved during the electoral process and also makes clear that the considerable amount of international assistance before and during the election was of almost no avail. IREC’s surprising conclusion was that the main problems in the elections were not the finalisation of the vote count and the tabulation or the subsequent presentation of results. One has to look to the country’s ethnic composition and history, to Kenya’s political culture, and to the incompetence of the Electoral Commission of Kenya to understand why the expectations of an exemplary electoral process were turned into such a misery, despite international assistance from the very beginning of the electoral process.

Jorgen Elklit specialises in the study of electoral systems and administration, electoral behaviour, political party membership, and democratization. He has written extensively on these subjects as well as on electoral administration. He has extensive experience since 1990 as an international advisor on elections and electoral systems in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Professor Elklit is a member of the South African Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) responsible for the conduct of the 1994 South African Parliamentary and Provincial Elections. He was also Secretary to the Independent Review Commission (Kenya) April-September 2008
Enquiries

Marija Taflaga, marija.taflaga@anu.edu.au

School of Politics & International Relations

Speaker: Dr Mark Dybul, Executive Director, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Time & Date: Monday 29 February 2016, 5.30pm

Venue: Molonglo Theatre, Level 2, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

Event-url: https://crawford.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/6893/2016-harold-mitchell…

Dr Dybul has worked on HIV and public health for more than 25 years as a clinician, scientist, teacher and administrator. After graduating from Georgetown Medical School in Washington DC, Dybul joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he conducted basic and clinical studies on HIV virology, immunology and treatment optimisation, including the first randomised, controlled trial with combination antiretroviral therapy in Africa.

Dybul became a founder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and was appointed as its leader in 2006, He served until early 2009.

Before coming to the Global Fund, Dybul was co-director of the Global Health Law Program at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

The Harold Mitchell Development Policy Annual Lecture Series, of which this is the fourth, has been created to provide a forum at which the most pressing development issues can be addressed by the best minds and most influential practitioners of our time.