Cameroon human rights record prompting Washington to end trade preference includes internet shutdowns

The announcement that the United States will end trade preferences for Cameroon in response to the country's human rights record marks some good news out of Washington and exemplifies the kind of "quid pro quo" that foreign policy is supposed to leverage.

In a freedom-of-expression angle to the story, documentary filmmakers screened Blacked Out: The Cameroon Internet Shutdown at RightsCon 2019 in Tunis over the summer.  The presentation fit perfectly into one of the key conference themes, "#KeepItOn."  I was privileged to be there and to meet one of the filmmakers, who talked about the extraordinary risk of documenting the minority anglophone community in Cameroon today.  More at Quartz Africa and at the Blacked Out YouTube channel.  The film can be viewed on YouTube in its 43-minute cut or its 65-minute uncut version, below.

Of interest to legal comparatists, there's an interesting underlying story in Cameroon's civil law tradition arising from a merger of French and British political possessions.  That's not the subject of the movie, but you can imagine the tension of legal tradition running in tandem with tensions of culture, language, and history, and all of that overlaid on and obscuring, in classic imperialist fashion, pre- and still-existing tribal cultures and customary legal traditions.