I stand corrected! So from what I read up, ICAO adherence only facililitates quicker processing at the entry point[0]. But member nations are not bound to anything.
So I previously thought that a country can obviously choose who it will accept with its own laws, but that it has to still recognise a valid travel document. That's obviously not true because there are many countries that refuse to recognise documents like the Israeli or Republic of China passports, despite them being perfectly standardised. Or the case of individually declared documents like the world passport or Liberland [1].
So in this case, the AU would have to formalise the status of the document in law, then member nations have to ratify it, before anyone should feel comfortable trying to travel on it. But of course, this isn't EU law that is generally well enforced; there's hardly anything stopping many African nations from flouting international, regional or even their very own set of laws! Hardly looking promising... It's just a shame there's so much wasted effort going in to this.
So I previously thought that a country can obviously choose who it will accept with its own laws, but that it has to still recognise a valid travel document. That's obviously not true because there are many countries that refuse to recognise documents like the Israeli or Republic of China passports, despite them being perfectly standardised. Or the case of individually declared documents like the world passport or Liberland [1].
So in this case, the AU would have to formalise the status of the document in law, then member nations have to ratify it, before anyone should feel comfortable trying to travel on it. But of course, this isn't EU law that is generally well enforced; there's hardly anything stopping many African nations from flouting international, regional or even their very own set of laws! Hardly looking promising... It's just a shame there's so much wasted effort going in to this.
0 - http://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/TRIP/Pages/default.aspx
1 - https://liberland.org/en/request/