The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights: forging a jurisdictional frontier in post-colonial human rights

Abstract

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was finally established in 2004 after decades of negotiations. Despite forty years of resistance from governments who were reluctant to sacrifice sovereignty to a supranational body, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Protocol grant the ACtHPR far-reaching authority relative to other regional human rights courts. How did the ACtHPR end up with an expansive jurisdiction that is unprecedented among regional courts? This analysis proposes that legal experts’ ability to capture control over vital stages in the drafting of the African Charter and Protocol, thus limiting the influence of political advisors, yielded an institutional design that facilitated the ACtHPR's unique mandate. Furthermore, colonial legacies in newly-independent states pushed the founders of the African human rights system to envision an innovative, post-colonial human rights framework that integrated a wide-reaching spectrum of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.