Human rights and the politics of regime legitimation in Africa: From rights commissions to truth commissions

This chapter argues that the proliferation of national human rights commissions and truth commissions represents an emerging global trend in statist appropriation of human rights discourse for regime legitimation. Human rights have become the new political ideology. In the post-Cold War world, human rights have become the most powerful creed for political legitimation. The proliferation of national human rights institutions across Africa in the …