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Agreement Establishing The African Continental Free Trade Area

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2019

James Thuo Gathii
James Thuo Gathii*
Affiliation:
Wing-Tat Lee Chair of International Law and Professor of Law, Loyola University Chicago School of Law.
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Extract

On May 30, 2019, the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) entered into force for the twenty-four countries that had deposited their instruments of ratification. When the remaining thirty-one member states of the African Union ratify it, the AfCFTA will cover a market of 1.2 billion people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of $2.5 trillion. That would make it the world's largest trade agreement since the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Type
International Legal Documents
Information
International Legal Materials , Volume 58 , Issue 5 , October 2019 , pp. 1028 - 1083
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by The American Society of International Law 

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), Mar. 21, 2018 (entered into force May 30, 2019), https://au.int/sites/default/files/treaties/36437-treaty-consolidated_text_on_cfta_-_en.pdf [hereinafter AfCFTA]. For more on the AfCFTA, see James Gathii, Introduction to the Symposium on the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), Afronomicslaw (Jan. 15, 2019), http://www.afronomicslaw.org/2019/01/13/introduction-to-the-symposium-on-the-african-continental-free-trade-agreement-afcfta/.

2 African Continental Free Trade Area - Questions & Answers, United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (UNECA) (2019), https://www.uneca.org/publications/african-continental-free-trade-area-questions-answers.

3 The annexes are as follows: Annex 1 on Schedules of Tariff Concessions; Annex 2 on Rules of Origin; Annex 3 on Customs Cooperation and Mutual Administrative Assistance; Annex 4 on Trade Facilitation; Annex 5 on Non-Tariff Barriers; Annex 6 on Technical Barriers to Trade; Annex 7 Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures; Annex 8 on Transit; and Annex 9 on Trade Remedies.

4 For example the AfCFTA's Protocol on Services in Article 2(a) provides that one of the objectives of the Protocol is the “development of trade-related infrastructure.”

5 African Union, Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want 17 (2015), http://www.un.org/en/africa/osaa/pdf/au/agenda2063.pdf. The AfCFTA also builds on other African Union initiatives including its African Union Commission Economic Commission for Africa, Boosting Intra-African Trade: Issues Affecting Intra-African Trade, Proposed Action Plan for boosting Intra-African Trade and Framework for Fast Tracking of a Continental Free Trade Area 6 (Oct. 8, 2012) [hereinafter Boosting Intra-African Trade], the Programme for Infrastructure Development for Africa (PIDA), and the Accelerated Industrial Development for Africa (AIDA).

6 Boosting Intra-African Trade, supra note 5, at 6.

7 Id. at 12.

8 Id.

9 Assessing Regional Integration in Africa V: Towards an African Continental Free Trade Area, U.N. Econ. Comm'n Afr. 43 (2012), http://www.uneca.org/sites/default/files/PublicationFiles/aria5_print_uneca_fin_20_july_1.pdf.

10 Treaty for the Establishment of the African Economic Community, June 3, 1991, 30 ILM 1241.

11 See Luwam Dirar, Norms of Solidarity and Regionalism: Theorizing State Behavior Among Southern African States, 24 Mich. St. Int'l L. Rev. 667 (2015).

12 See Clair Gammage, Symposium: ACP-EU Cooperation: Challenges and Opportunities for the Post-2020 Relationship, Afronomicslaw (May 27, 2019), available at http://www.afronomicslaw.org/2019/05/27/acp-eu-cooperation-challenges-and-opportunities-for-the-post-2020-relationship/.

13 See James Gathii, Introduction to the Symposium on Africa and the Future of International Trade Regimes, 111 AJIL Unbound 369 (2018), https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/0962D8F0B30178E38020DD1001351027/S2398772317000940a.pdf/introduction_to_the_symposium_on_africa_and_the_future_of_international_trade_regimes.pdf.

14 These are the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA); the East African Community (EAC); the Southern African Development Community (SADC); the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD); the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD); the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA).

15 One of the AfCFTA's negotiating objectives recognized that the AfCFTA acquis is the progress achieved by subregional communities in their trade negotiations. Article 20(2) of the Agreement Establishing the AfCFTA embodies this acquis by providing that “State Parties that are members of other regional economic communities, regional trading arrangements and custom unions, which have attained among themselves higher levels of regional integration than under this Agreement, shall maintain such higher levels among themselves.” Id. See also Article 7(1) AfCFTA Protocol on Trade in Goods; Article 21(2) of the Treaty for the Establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (providing that where AfCFTA member states “have attained among themselves high levels of regional integration than under this Agreement, [they] shall maintain such higher levels among themselves”).

16 AfCFTA, supra note 1, art. 21(1).

17 Id.

18 Id.

19 TRALAC, SADC-EAC-COMESA Tripartite Free Trade Area Legal Texts and Policy Documents, available at https://www.tralac.org/resources/by-region/comesa-eac-sadc-tripartite-fta.html.

20 James Gathii, African Regional Trade Agreements in Legal Regimes (2011) (arguing that variable geometry and similar flexibility regimes are at the core of African regionalism).

21 AfCFTA, supra note 1, art. 29.

22 Id. art. 6. This provides for the establishment of an AfCFTA NTB Coordination Unit.