Professor of Law, Universities of Nice (France) and Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire)

OHADA, the Organisation for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa, was originally established by Treaty between African countries in the franc zone and signed at Port Louis (Mauritius) on 17 October 1993. It now has 14 member States in Africa. Its objective is to stabilise and develop the economies of its member States by modernising the legal infrastructure governing business undertakings in that part of the world. So far, it has adopted five Uniform Acts dealing respectively with general commercial law, company and commercial interest grouping law, securities law, bankruptcy law and debt recovery law and enforcement procedures. These various instruments are taken by the author as the basis of his research.

 Starting with the preparation of the Uniform Acts, the author focuses in particular on the substantive scope of harmonisation ("business law" being a rather vague concept which nevertheless has identifiable objective limits and is subject to policy considerations), the technical procedure, and formulation (language and wording). Going on the implementation of the Acts (under the Treaty, "the Uniform Acts are directly applicable and overriding in the Contracting States notwithstanding any conflict they may give rise to in respect of previous or subsequent enactment of municipal laws"), the author concentrates on two main issues: the scope of application (stressing in particular the lack of precision as regards the substantive application of the Acts vis-à-vis the national law) and its monitoring. In this connection, he subjects the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration - a novel institution with consultative and jurisdictional powers - to a critical examination and seeks to formulate an answer to some of the many question-marks.

The approach adopted both in preparing the Uniform Acts and in applying them emerges, if not as positively novel, certainly as daring and definitely aims at optimising both the supranational dimension and the process of uniformisation itself. That is not to say that the task which OHADA has set itself is an easy one, nor that the pursuit of workable uniform law is not fraught with difficulty. It is this approach, and its technical aspects, as well as the problems encountered on the way, that form the subject of this study.