An Analysis of the African Union's Constitutive Act: Has the Act 'Constitutionalised' the Union?

The adoption of the Constitutive Act (the Act) in 2000 by the now-defunct Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was the turning point in the long-held vision of enhancing the unity and integration of the African continent. The Act ushered in a radical transformation of the legal regime of its forerunner, the OAU Charter of 1963 (the Charter). The Charter was a classical international convention with all the attributes of such a convention - a weak institutional framework and similarly weak enforcement mechanisms. The transition from the Charter to the Act corresponds with a discernible shift worldwide towards the constitutionalisation of international legal regimes. Therefore, the Act introduces some semblance of constitutionalisation as it attempts to create an executive structure (the Executive Council), a legislative structure (the Pan-African Parliament), and a judicial structure (the Court of Justice). The crisp question that this paper investigated is whether the Act has constitutionalised the African Union (AU) par excellence. The paper's central thesis is that the Act has constitutionalised the AU to some extent, but it has created a weak model of constitutionalisation. The paper used the qualitative content analysis method to collate and analyse the data relevant to the research question.