The International Law of Secession and the Protection of the Human Rights of Oppressed Substate Groups: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity; Former Chairperson, United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, Geneva, Switzerland; University Research Chair in International and Transnational Legal Studies at the Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada; and, most recently, Gani Fawehinmi Distinguished Chair in Human Rights Law at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Abuja, Nigeria. Ph.D, LL.M (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada); LL.M, LL.B (Hons) (University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus, Nigeria). I am grateful to John Mastrangelo, former JD student at the Osgoode Hall Law School, for his extraordinarily able research assistance. I specially dedicate this paper to my ever patient and loving family (Atugonza, Ojiako, Mbabazi and Kosi), without whose solid and unflinching support this paper would not have seen the light of day. I also thank the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially Professor Sumudu Attapatu, for the invitation to present this paper at that institution as the 2015 Mildred Fish-Harnack Lecture on Human Rights and Democracy. Parts of this paper have been influenced and shaped by my previous work on the international law of statehood, for example, Okafor, ‘Re-Defining’ (n 2) and Okafor, ‘Entitlement’ (n 2).