State Fragility and the Future of Human Rights in the Sahel Region

International human rights law imposes a duty to respect, protect, promote and fulfill human rights on states and establishes various mechanisms and normative standards to ensure they meet these obligations. But what happens when a state in question struggles with upholding this duty because it is beset by political, security, or governance challenges that undermine its ability to act as a guarantor of rights? Join us for a conversation with Ibrahima Kane, a leading expert, litigator and advocate within the African human rights system, for a deep dive into the structural challenges driving the most salient human rights issues in the Sahel region today. Drawing from decades of practical experience, he will share insights on conducting human rights work in the context of state fragility and propose solutions tailored to the Sahel that go beyond mere crisis management or short-term security responses.

Ibrahima Kane is an Economic Rights Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Analyse des Sociétés et Pouvoirs Afrique-Diasporas (LASPAD), a premier research hub based at Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Previously, he served as Special Adviser to the Executive Director of OSF–Africa, where he led the African Union Advocacy Program, and before that, as a senior lawyer heading the Africa Program at INTERIGHTS. A qualified lawyer in both Senegal and France, Kane has extensive experience in human rights advocacy and litigation before the political, judicial, and quasi-judicial institutions of the African Union and ECOWAS.

Abadir M. Ibrahim (moderator), J.S.D., is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. His current research focuses on African approaches to human rights which studies, among other things, the iteration and practice of human rights as impacted by Africa’s (post)colonial, religious and traditional heritages. He is the co-editor of Between Failure and Redemption: The Future of the Ethiopian Social Contract (Northwestern Univ., 2022) and Righting Human Rights through Legal Reform: Ethiopia’s Contemporary Experience (Addis Ababa Univ., 2020).