The Protection of Individual Rights and Freedoms in Cameroon’s Legal Order: Prospects for an Emerging Country

Abstract

The existence of laws in every given society has as raison d’être the preservation of individual rights and freedoms and to encourage the peaceful coexistence between the government and the governed. The aim of this paper is to examine the protection of individual rights and freedoms under the Cameroonian legal instruments while determining how an effective protection of these rights and freedoms can contribute to a country’s political, economic, and socio-cultural developments. It is against these backdrops that Cameroon with its vision of emergence by 2035 has been chosen in a bit to highlight that, among other things, an effective protection of individual rights and freedoms, which can no doubt act as a catalyst to foster the rapid realization of such a vision. To achieve this objective and to deal with the research problem, we undertook desk research in libraries, relevant documentation centers, and internet websites which enabled us to review the existing literature on the question. The findings reveal that Cameroon has a sound legal system for the preservation of individual rights and freedoms but has failed grossly at the level of operation and enforcement. With the gross violation of these legal norms, it is recommended (among other things) that there is the need to put in place effective independent enforcement mechanisms to guarantee the strict respect of existing national and international laws dealing with the protection of individual rights and freedoms so as to attain the objective of an emerging nation state.