Speaker of Parliament Alban Bagbin has condemned the trend of tying foreign assistance to reforms in the internal laws of recipient states, calling it a breach of the sovereign equality principle captured in the United Nations Charter.
He said development support should not come with demands to adopt legal or cultural standards that clash with the values, customs and interests of receiving nations.
Addressing the 4th Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family, Sovereignty and Values, Bagbin asked international partners to honour Africa’s sovereignty and avoid using aid to shape local legal frameworks.
“I want to emphasise that conditioning aid on the alteration of domestic laws to the disadvantage of beneficiary countries violates the principle of sovereign equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter,” he stated.
The Speaker stressed that African states do not try to impose their legal or cultural systems on other regions and therefore expect equal respect in return.
“We in Africa do not seek to dictate the internal legal frameworks of other continents, and we expect, in turn, the same respect for our sovereignty,” he said.
Hon. Bagbin further warned against attempts to push legal and cultural models foreign to Africa’s social and cultural base, cautioning that such moves could weaken the continent’s identity and heritage.
He urged Africans to reject the idea that advancement and modernization mean discarding deep-rooted cultural norms and institutions.
The Speaker also argued that dominant Western views of family do not match African realities, asserting that family units on the continent are wider, more linked and more durable than the nuclear model often tied to Western societies.
“The Western concept of the nuclear family—isolated, individualistic and strictly bounded—fails to capture the expansive, resilient and self-sustaining genius of the African family,” he added.
