La codification et le développement progressif du droit de la prévention des conflits armés internes en Afrique de l’Ouest

Abstract

Since the end of the cold war in the last decade of the 1990s, prevention of internal armed conflicts have become major concerns of the international community. To curb this new category of armed conflict, UN organizes operations peacekeeping which fit perfectly under Chapters VI, VII and VIII of the Charter. The Security Council of the United Nations successively referred to those three chapters of the Charter to adopt resolutions 1645 on the establishment of the Peace building Commission and 1894 concerning protection of civilians in armed conflict. Peacekeeping operations of the United Nations cannot find their sources anywhere ever than in a set of unwritten principles deducted from the fluctuating practice of various peacekeeping missions of the United Nations. Because of his character dissimilar, not in accordance with itself and non-uniform in time and space, this practice does not constitute a precedent for the formulation of an international customary rule. Alongside this political practice of intervention of the UN, ECOWAS has undertaken to formulate a law of the prevention of internal armed conflicts based on the classical international law of armed conflicts and on the principles of the international Community law which makes it binding on all Member States of ECOWAS which consent.

The African Union has already appropriated this law of the prevention of internal armed conflicts. It remains to be accepted by the United Nations to establish an international universal law of the prevention of internal armed conflicts and to advance the codification and progressive development of international law.