Accra, May 10, GNA -The Ecowas conference on the Regional integration model has opened with a call on member countries to help align Community objectives to the necessary legal framework.
Justice Edward Amoako Asante, the President of the ECOWAS Court of Justice, who made the call, said members of the regional bloc needed to address gaps and strengthen the legal framework of the integration project.
“It does not suffice to merely have a strong legal regime without an identifiable Community legal order,” he said.
The virtual and in-person conference, which opens in Praia, Cape Verde’s capital city, is being held on the theme: “ECOWAS Integration model: the legal implications of Regionalism, Sovereignty, and Supranationalism.”
It will enable a panel of discussants consisting of jurists and scholars from the Ecowas Member States, ECOWAS Institutions, International Organisations and Development partners to discuss the theme under seven sub-themes.
The international conference, which was opened by the Cape Verdean President José Maria Neves, seeks to provide a forum for a comprehensive review of the legal and institutional architecture for a regional integration project and the legal implications of regionalism, sovereignty, and supra-nationalism.
The conference would pay particular attention to the existing legal framework for the ECOWAS integration project and especially on what needed to be done to strengthen the existing legal and institutional architecture.
President Asante said every regional integration project was anchored on a legal framework, around which policies and decisions of the integration project revolved.
It also governs the legal relationship between the Member States of the Community and the supranational organization created by the Member States for the integration project.
“This conference, therefore, gives us a golden opportunity to evaluate the existing legal framework of the ECOWAS integration project and the ECOWAS legal order.
The legal framework in most regional integration systems usually implies the direct applicability of Community norms in the Member States and the rights of Community citizens to invoke Community norms before the national courts of the integrating Member States, he said.
Justice Asante expressed worry about the lack of a functional Community legal order that highlighted the legal relationship between the Member States and the ECOWAS Institutions and between the ECOWAS Court of Justice and the national courts of Member States.
He also cited the reduction in the number of judges from seven to five and the tenure of the judges from five years to four years as some of the challenges affecting the delivery of the court.
“The conference will therefore have the opportunity to place on the front burner, the essential issues in the establishment of a functional legal framework in a regional integration,” he added.
President Neves, in his opening speech, said regional integration was fundamental to the growth of the countries in the sub-region.
He said despite the challenges, a lot of progress had been made in promoting the ECOWAS integration agenda and urged member countries to preserve and reinforce their efforts to attain the goals of economic development.
Other speakers include Dr. Joana Rosa, Minister of Justice of Cape Verde.
In a keynote address, the Guest Speaker Professor Solomon Ebobrah, said there had been a slight change in the institutional structure of ECOWAS, but the balance of powers still remained with the Member States while the independent Community institutions were left on the fringes and lacked any significant capacity to shape the course of integration.
He said the Member States had elected to engage in some pooling of sovereignties instead of a delegation of sovereignties to Community organs or institutions and in doing so Member States had abandoned the use of treaties for Community governance and instead resorted to a new legal regime that had the frame of supranationalism yet lacked the quality to bind the Member States against their will.
“Acts of the Community still have no practical direct and authoritative binding effect within national legal spaces, requiring the transformatory intervention of Member States before they can have any legal consequences within those spaces,” he said.
Notwithstanding the general undertakings made by the Member States, implementation of Community legal output remains challenging so that the obstacles to the creation of the ECOWAS market remained significant since the Community institutions lack the capacity to drive integration on their own.
Professor Eborbrah said appropriate national action as required by the constitution of each state needed to be taken for integration to affect international sovereignty.
The opening session was followed by a panel discussion on the sub-theme “ECOWAS Integration Model” moderated by Honourable Justice Emmanuel Yonny Kulendi, the Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Ghana.
GNA
