The African Court of Human Rights and Peoples` Rights: Basic documents

The creation of a human rights court for Africa offers significant opportunities to secure a better life for all on the continent. So far,the potential of the African Court of Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights in complementing the protective mandate of the ACommHPR has remained largely unexplored. In the only case submitted to it, the Court correctly — but through an inordinately protracted process — concluded that it did not have jurisdiction to deal with the matter. There are several reasons for this dearth of cases. A major reason is that some of the States that are most frequently found in violation of their Charter obligations by the ACommHPR have not yet ratified the AfCHPRProtocol. The ACommHPR can therefore not transfer these cases tothe AfCHPR. Regardless of the lack of cases and power of the court, it is interesting to get a firm understanding of the documents that underly the establishment of the AfCHPR to be able to compare them to already existing courts. The editors have thus tried to complement already existing background materials on (inter)national courts.