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Finding OHADA case law and African business law in English: a practitioner's guide
You are advising on a cross-border deal, an arbitration, or a compliance matter touching Francophone Africa, and you need the OHADA business law that governs it: a uniform act, a company law provision, a CCJA judgment. You run your usual searches in English and hit a wall. The authoritative texts are in French, the case law summaries are French only, and the few English materials you find are unofficial, undated, or partial. For a common-law practitioner, OHADA can feel like a closed system.
This guide explains why African business law is so hard to reach in English, how to work with it as a non-French reader, and where to find the texts and case law you can actually rely on.
What you are looking for, in practice
OHADA, the Organisation for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa, is a treaty-based system created in Port-Louis in 1993 and revised in 2008, now covering seventeen mainly French-speaking states. Its uniform acts are directly and mandatorily applicable in every member state, overriding conflicting national law. Its supreme court, the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration in Abidjan, acts as a supranational court of cassation for the interpretation of those acts and also administers OHADA arbitration.
For an international practitioner, three needs recur: the current version of a uniform act (company law, secured transactions, debt recovery and enforcement, accounting), the position of the CCJA on a specific question, and a way to work with all of this despite the language barrier.
Why it is so hard in English
The authoritative texts are French. The uniform acts and the CCJA case law are drafted and published in French. Official consolidated English translations are scarce, and where they exist they are not always current.
CCJA case law is a French-only blind spot. On the main reference portal, the summaries of CCJA judgments are provided in French only, and full-text access requires registration. There is no consolidated English database of OHADA case law. This is one of the most acute gaps in access to African business law.
Mixed legal traditions add friction. Africa spans common law, civil law, Islamic law and customary systems. Cameroon is even bijural and bilingual, combining anglophone common law and francophone civil law, which complicates research and citation even for local practitioners.
Versions are hard to pin down. Uniform acts are revised over time. The act on simplified recovery procedures and enforcement measures, for example, was substantially rewritten in Kinshasa in October 2023, replacing the 1998 text. Relying on an older PDF means relying on a repealed text.
English materials are scattered and unofficial. What you find in English tends to be firm briefings, academic summaries or machine translations, useful for orientation but not citable as the law.
The manual method, step by step
Start from the uniform act itself, identifying the current consolidated French version and its revision date, rather than an undated English summary.
Confirm the version is in force, checking for later revisions, since several acts have been rewritten.
For case law, work from the French summaries and, where language is a barrier, translate the operative reasoning carefully rather than relying on a secondary English paraphrase.
Cross-check national application, as courts of the seventeen member states apply the uniform acts and their decisions matter for enforcement.
The fast method with Maathis
Maathis brings the legislation, case law and doctrine of Francophone Africa into a single engine, with consolidated, interlinked texts and natural-language search. For OHADA, you can browse the public hubs without an account: the uniform acts in their consolidated versions, the CCJA and OHADA case law, and the full OHADA corpus. You search by question rather than by reference, each judgment is linked to the act it applies, and the built-in translation helps common-law practitioners work with French-language sources without losing the authoritative text underneath.
If you also read French, our companion guide explains how to find a CCJA judgment in detail.
Frequently asked questions
Is OHADA case law available in English? Not in any consolidated, official form. The reference portal provides CCJA summaries in French only, and there is no English database of OHADA judgments. This is the single biggest obstacle for anglophone practitioners.
Are the OHADA uniform acts available in English? Official English translations are limited and not always current. The authoritative versions are French, so any serious analysis should rest on the French text, with translation as an aid rather than a substitute.
How many uniform acts are there, and are they up to date? There are eleven uniform acts in force, several of which have been revised. The version in force matters: the recovery and enforcement act, for instance, was rewritten in 2023, superseding the 1998 text.
Why does Cameroon come up as a special case? Because it is bijural and bilingual, applying both common law and civil law in different regions, which makes legal research and citation there unusually demanding.
In short
Working with OHADA in English means fighting a language barrier that the free sources do little to lift, especially for case law. An engine that consolidates the uniform acts, links case law to the texts it applies and offers translation over authoritative French sources turns a closed system into a workable one.
Create your Maathis account to search the legislation, case law and doctrine of Francophone Africa, including the OHADA uniform acts and CCJA judgments, with the authoritative text always in view. It is built for practitioners who need African business law they can actually cite.
