(2018) 2 African Human Rights Yearbook 63 have committed a long list of human rights abuses and violations. On the all-important question of self-determination for the people of the Southern Cameroons (that is, the right to decolonisation from annexation and colonial occupation by Cameroun Republic), the Commission failed to rise to the occasion. The expectation kindled by the case turned out to be an evanescent hope. The Commission characterised the Southern Cameroons long struggle for decolonisation and full control over its territory as ‘engaging in secession’. It declared that ‘secession’ is not a variant of self-determination recognised under the Charter (paragraph 192, 202). The ruling that the basic population of the Southern Cameroons constitutes a ‘people’ clearly has implications for the rights which attach to that term under international law. One such right is that of self-determination. The Commission further declared that the Southern Cameroons is part of Cameroun Republic and that its claim to independence would violate the territorial integrity of that country. The Commission did not say how the Southern Cameroons could mysteriously be part of the territory of the French-speaking state of Cameroun Republic which achieved independence from France on 1 January 1960 without the Southern British Cameroons within its boundaries before or at independence. How could the UN’s purported ‘decolonisation’ of British-administered Southern Cameroons in 1961 have possibly taken place within the French-speaking independent state of Cameroun Republic which itself was a UN trust territory separate and distinct from the Southern Cameroons? It is sometimes claimed that the Southern Cameroons ‘joined’ Cameroun Republic in October 1961. But a ‘joining’ of peoples or of territories cannot be informal. It is always formal, underpinned by an agreement concluded between the parties, which in this case is lacking. The salient facts in Gumne were these. The date of the independence of the Southern British Cameroons was set by the United Nations for 1 October 1961 to coincide with the date of termination of United Nations trusteeship of the territory.48 The achievement of that independence was unlawfully suppressed by Cameroun Republic. On the same day of termination of trusteeship, the departing British colonial authorities unlawfully handed the instruments of power, not to the functional government of the Southern Cameroons as required by international law (UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence, 1960) but inexplicably to the French-speaking foreign state of Cameroun Republic, which then assumed an illegitimate oppressive power over the Southern Cameroons as successor colonialist. The result of these two events (Cameroun Republic’s unlawful suppression of the independence of the Southern British Cameroons and the British transfer of the Southern British Cameroons to the sovereignty of Cameroun Republic) was re-colonisation of the Southern British Cameroons rather than decolonisation of the territory. This colonisation by the adjacent French-speaking state of Cameroun 48 UN General Assembly ‘The Future of the Trust Territory of the Cameroons Under United Kingdom Administration’ A/RES/1608) 21 April 1961.