The Department of Legal Studies hosted the SUN course Constitution-building in Africa (https://legal.ceu.edu/events/2016-07-11/constitution-building-africa-summer-university-2016) between July 11 - July 22, 2016. The 2-week summer course was convened for the fourth time, with the generous support of International IDEA and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Faculty members in residence included H. Kwasi Prempeh, Omar Hamady, Babacar Kante and Horace Adjolohoun.
The course covered challenges and experiences of ongoing and recent constitution-building efforts in North Africa, Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Course directors Markus Böckenförde, Gedion T. Hessebon and Renáta Uitz designed an interactive and interdisciplinary curriculum for a diverse group of practitioners, civil society activists and academics. Among the participants we were honored to welcome Judge Sissoko Bamassa of the Constitutional Court of Mali and Mr Douglas Mwonzora whose role in drafting the constitution of Zimbabwe is also featured in the highly acclaimed documentary film, The Democrats (dir.: Camilla Nielsson, 2014).
The mid-course workshop featured a keynote address by Yash Ghai, a thematic panel on gender in constitution-building introduced by Jill Cottrell, a thematic panel on presidential term limits with a guest presentation from course alumna Katrin Seidl and a talk on unconstitutional constitutional amendments by Adem Abebe. Since the summer course several workshop presentations were turned into contributions for International IDEA's blog on constitutional developments, constitutionnet.org. The curriculum also included a laboratory using International IDEA's innovative tool, Constitution Assessment for Women's equality (http://www.idea.int/publications/constitution-assessment-for-womens-equality/index.cfm) under the direction of Katalin Dobias (CCL 2011).