The application of African Union (human rights) law in Uganda: trends and prospects from a comparative review Busingye Kabumba* ABSTRACT: The body of public international law that may be known as ‘African Union (AU) law’, that is to say, the treaties, resolutions, constitutive documents, jurisprudence and practices of the AU, now constitute a respectable corpus of legal material. However, not only is this body of law under-theorised and under-studied by general public international law scholars, the nature of its reception and application within the domestic legal orders of AU member states is even more neglected. This article seeks to address the dearth of scholarship in this regard by critically analysing the judicial reference to AU law in one African country – Uganda – having particular regard to the reception of human rights related AU law. TITRE ET RÉSUMÉ EN FRANCAIS: L’application du droit (des droits de l’homme) de l’Union africaine en Ouganda: une analyse comparée des tendances et perspectives RÉSUMÉ: Le corpus du droit international public pouvant être dénommé ‘droit de l’Union africaine’, composé des traités, des résolutions, des documents statutaires, de la jurisprudence et des pratiques de l’UA constituent désormais un corpus respectable de textes juridiques. Cependant, non seulement ces normes juridiques sont sousétudiées et sous-théorisées par les spécialistes du droit international public général mais encore la nature de leur incorporation et de leur application dans l’ordre juridique internes des États membres de l’Union africaine est encore plus négligée. Cet article conduit une analyse critique de la référence à ces normes par les juridictions de un pays africain – l’Ouganda – avec un accent particulier sur la réception et l’intégration des normes de l’Union africaine en matière des droits de l’homme. KEY WORDS: African Union law, regional economic communities, Ugandan judiciary, East African Community, European Union * LLB (Makerere), BCL (Oxford), LLMC (Harvard) LLD (Pretoria); Lecturer, School of Law, Makerere University; kbusingy@ gmail.com. I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors of the Yearbook, whose valuable and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article, greatly enhanced the quality of this work. I am greatly indebted to the Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOX) and the Faculty of Law of the University of Oxford, for the award of the inaugural AfOx-Law Visiting Fellowship for the period October to November 2018; and to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, for the award of a Plumer Visiting Fellowship covering the same duration. This article would not have seen the light of day but for the opportunity for thought and reflection provided by these Fellowships. My sincere thanks, as such, to Jonathan Herring, Kevin Marsh, Anne Makena, Liora Lazarus, Imogen Goold, Antonios Tzanakopoulos, and many others too numerous to mention individually. All errors and omissions in the article, of course, remain solely mine. 89 B Kabumba ‘The application of African Union (human rights) law in Uganda: trends and prospects from a comparative review’ (2018) 2 African Human Rights Yearbook 89-130 http://doi.org/10.29053/2523-1367/2018/v2n1a5