What AU is and how it works

What the membership rule is

The Constitutive Act sets one test for joining and it is territorial. Article 29 lets any African state notify the Chairperson of the Commission of its intention to accede, and admission is then decided by a simple majority of the member states, each transmitting its decision back to the Chairperson. There is no economic threshold at the door and no political one. That is why the roster runs to 55, and why it takes in the island states of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean as readily as the mainland: Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Comoros, Mauritius, Seychelles and Madagascar are all members, and none of them sits on the continental landmass.

Article 24 puts the headquarters at Addis Ababa. Article 25 makes the working languages African languages where possible, together with Arabic, English, French and Portuguese, which is close to what the member records hold: those four are the official languages that recur across them, and Swahili recurs in the east.

From the Charter to the Act

Thirty-two independent African states agreed at Addis Ababa on 25 May 1963 to establish the Organisation of African Unity. Another twenty-one joined as they became independent, and the roster stood at fifty-three by the time the Union succeeded it. South Africa was not among the founders. Its accession is dated 6 June 1994 on the Union's own list, six weeks after the election that ended apartheid rule.

The decision to replace the OAU was taken at Sirte in Libya on 9 September 1999, and the Constitutive Act was adopted at the thirty-sixth ordinary session of the Assembly, done at Lomé in Togo on 11 July 2000. The Act entered into force thirty days after two-thirds of the OAU's members had deposited their instruments of ratification, and it replaced the OAU Charter outright, leaving that Charter operative for a transitional year while assets and liabilities were handed over.

The one contested seat

The list of states that adopted the Act at Lomé runs to fifty-three names, and the thirty-ninth of them is the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Morocco is not on it. The Sahrawi republic's membership is dated 22 February 1982 on the Union's roster, and Morocco left the OAU rather than sit beside it.

Morocco came back. Its accession is dated 31 January 2017 on the same roster, after a vote at the twenty-eighth ordinary session of the Assembly at Addis Ababa, and both it and the Sahrawi republic hold seats now. Whether joining a body that seats the Sahrawi republic carries any implication of recognition has been argued in the legal literature ever since, and this catalogue does not settle it.

The territory is filed here as disputed, and it is the one member with no seat at the United Nations. On the UN's own decolonisation list Western Sahara has been a Non-Self-Governing Territory since 1963 with no administering power named, after Spain informed the Secretary-General on 26 February 1976 that it had terminated its presence there. Both readings are on the record and neither is resolved here.

What joining commits a member to

Article 4 carries the principles, and three of them do most of the work. Borders as they stood at independence are to be respected. The Union claims a right to intervene in a member state, on a decision of the Assembly, in grave circumstances named as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and a member may also request intervention to restore peace and security on its own territory. Unconstitutional changes of government are condemned and rejected, and Article 30 gives that a consequence: a government coming to power through unconstitutional means is not allowed to participate in the activities of the Union.

Suspension under Article 30 is not expulsion. Membership ends only under Article 31, which requires a written notification to the Chairperson and takes effect a year later if it is not withdrawn, so a suspended state stays on the roster and the count here does not move when a seat goes quiet. Article 23 provides separately for sanctions on a member in arrears on its contributions, starting with the loss of the right to speak and to vote.

The human rights instrument the Union inherited is older than the Union. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights was adopted on 27 June 1981 and entered into force on 21 October 1986, and it is the text the continental human rights bodies apply.

The trade layer

The Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area was opened for signature at the summit held at Kigali from 17 to 21 March 2018, where forty-four member states signed the consolidated text. It entered into force on 30 May 2019, thirty days after the twenty-second instrument of ratification reached the Chairperson of the Commission, who is the depositary, and twenty-four states were party on that date. The operational phase was launched at Niamey on 7 July 2019, the Secretariat was handed over at Accra on 17 August 2020, and 1 January 2021 was approved as the date trading under the agreement would begin. Eritrea had still not signed the consolidated text in 2026.

Where the memberships overlap

A member of the Union is nearly always a member of something smaller as well, and the Act expects it: one of the stated objectives is to coordinate and harmonise policy between the existing and future regional economic communities. The member records show those overlaps directly, in ECOWAS, in SADC, in COMESA, in the East African Community, in the Economic Community of Central African States and in the Arab Maghreb Union. The same records show ties that run outside the continent as well, to the Commonwealth, the Francophonie, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Each of those is a hub of its own here, and each member's page lists the groups it belongs to.