What EAC is and how it works

The date the Community keeps

One day of the year runs through the founding papers. The Agreement for the Establishment of the Permanent Tripartite Commission for East African Co-operation was signed at Kampala on 30 November 1993. The Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community was done at Arusha on 30 November 1999 and entered into force on 7 July 2000, once the three signatories had deposited their instruments of ratification, which is all Article 152 asks for. The Court and the Assembly were inaugurated at Arusha on 30 November 2001. The Protocol on the Establishment of the East African Monetary Union was signed on 30 November 2013.

The community that was wound up

The Community's own account of itself begins in 1917, with a customs union between Kenya and Uganda that Tanganyika joined in 1927. The East African High Commission ran from 1948 to 1961, and the East African Common Services Organisation from 1961 to 1967. A community of the same name as this one existed from 1967 to 1977 and was dissolved. Its assets and liabilities were divided by a mediation agreement signed in 1984, and the three states went on to sign the tripartite agreement of 1993 and to open its secretariat at Arusha on 14 March 1996.

Article 9(3) of the present treaty carries the older arrangement forward by name. The East African Development Bank, the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation and the surviving institutions of the former East African Community are deemed institutions of the Community from the day the treaty takes effect. A body that outlived the collapse was not re-created; it was re-designated.

What the treaty sets out to do

Article 5(2) fixes the order of the work: a customs union, a common market, subsequently a monetary union and ultimately a political federation. The customs union has been in force since 2005, on the footing of Article 75. The Common Market Protocol took effect in 2010 and provides for the movement of goods, persons, labour, services and capital, together with rights of establishment and residence. The Monetary Union Protocol of 30 November 2013 set a horizon of ten years for a single currency, and none has been issued. A political confederation was adopted on 20 May 2017 as a transitional model of the political federation, which leaves the fourth stage one remove short of the word Article 5(2) uses for it.

What an applicant is weighed against

Article 3 leaves membership with the partner states acting together, and paragraph 3 lists what they take into account in an application: acceptance of the Community as the treaty sets it out; adherence to universally acceptable principles of good governance, democracy, the rule of law, observance of human rights and social justice; potential contribution to the strengthening of integration within the East African region; geographical proximity to and interdependence with the partner states; establishment and maintenance of a market driven economy; and social and economic policies compatible with those of the Community. Paragraph 5 keeps observer status for a country in the hands of the Summit, and for an intergovernmental or civil society organisation in the hands of the Council.

Rwanda and Burundi acceded on 18 June 2007, with effect from 1 July 2007. South Sudan acceded on 15 April 2016, with effect from 15 August 2016 on the Community's overview page and from 5 September 2016 on its page of partner states; both dates are published by the Community in its own name. The Democratic Republic of the Congo acceded on 8 April 2022, with effect from 11 July 2022, and Somalia on 15 December 2023, with effect from 4 March 2024.

Proximity, and how far it now reaches

Criterion (d) is geographical proximity and interdependence, and the roster it has produced holds a coast on the Indian Ocean and a coast on the Atlantic. This catalogue files six of the members under East Africa. It files the Democratic Republic of the Congo under Central Africa and Somalia under the Horn of Africa, which is a statement about where those records sit here rather than about where the region ends.

The other memberships on the member records pull in different directions. Tanzania is filed with the Southern African Development Community and not with COMESA; the Democratic Republic of the Congo is filed with both. Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan and Uganda are in IGAD, and Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda in ECCAS. Where a grouping is argued about, this page records the argument and settles it no further.

A court a resident may file in

Article 9 names seven organs: the Summit, the Council, the Co-ordination Committee, Sectoral Committees, the East African Court of Justice, the East African Legislative Assembly and the Secretariat, with a power in the Summit to establish others.

Article 30 lets any person resident in a partner state refer to the Court the legality of an act, regulation, directive, decision or action of a partner state or of an institution of the Community, and allows two months from the act complained of. What such a person may argue is bounded by Article 27(1), which confines the Court to the interpretation and application of the treaty. Article 27(2) provides that the Court shall have such other original, appellate, human rights and other jurisdiction as the Council determines at a suitable subsequent date, and that the partner states shall conclude a protocol to bring it about. That protocol has not been concluded.

Article 50(1) requires the national assembly of each partner state to elect nine members of the Assembly, and not from among its own members. Those elected are to represent, as far as is feasible, the political parties sitting in that national assembly, shades of opinion, gender and other special interest groups. Article 51 gives them five years, renewable once. The minister responsible for East African Community affairs in each partner state, the Secretary General and the Counsel to the Community sit ex officio.

The language of the Community

Article 137 is two sentences long. English is the official language of the Community, and Kiswahili is to be developed as a lingua franca. Six of the member records carry English among their official languages and four carry Swahili; the records for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and for Somalia carry neither.