Are we really on the same page? Understanding the distortion of human rights law in Africa by anti-rights actors
Posted: 16 March, 2026 Filed under: Lakshita Kanhiya, Michael Gyan Nyarko | Tags: African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, African values, anti-rights actors, anti-rights backlash, challenges, constitutionalism, culture, family, human rights law, morality, national sovereignty, regional norm-setting, religion, religious fundamentalism, shrinking civic space, strategic litigation, the human rights mechanisms, transnational funding Leave a comment |
Author: Lakshita Kanhiya Legal Officer, Initiative for Strategic Litigation (ISLA) in Africa |
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Author: Michael Gyan Nyarko Deputy Executive Director, Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) |
Too much ‘progress’ too soon?
For the past two and half decades, Africa’s human rights architecture has steadily expanded normatively, institutionally, and jurisprudentially. From the humble beginnings of African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and ‘baby’ steps of its monitoring body the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in the 1990s, the turn of the new millennium saw an increase in the number of norms as well as institutions mandated by the African Union to promote and protect human rights, including the establishment and operationalisation of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Even with all the institutional, political and other challenges that regional these institutions have faced, they have contributed to relatively progressive human rights landscape, influencing progressive decisions of national courts and regional bodies, and contributed to embedding the language of dignity, equality, and freedom in legal and political discourse across the continent. Constitutionalism, regional norm-setting, and strategic litigation have strengthened the visibility and legitimacy of human rights principles in both legal and public arenas.
On Indicator 16.3.3 of SDG 16.3 – Measurements of Civil Justice
Posted: 5 November, 2021 Filed under: Menelik Solomon Mamo | Tags: access to justice, human rights law, justiciable problems, SDG 16, SDG framework, Sustainable Development Goals, Unsentenced detainees, victims of violence Leave a comment
Author: Menelik Solomon Mamo
Consultant and attorney, Ethiopia
Access to Justice, as a component of the rule of law, is comprised of a number of elements that at its core means that individuals and communities with legal needs know where to go for help, obtain the help they need, and move through a system that offers procedural, substantive, and expeditious justice. According to the World Justice Project’s (WJP) report, Measuring the Justice Gap, 5.1 billion people or approximately two-thirds of the world’s population are faced with at least one justice issue. It is evident that the majority of these justiciable matters that individuals face fall within the ambit of civil justice. The fact that individuals, especially those from developing countries, are surrounded by these problems while lacking access to justice to deal with them, form part of the dynamics that create and perpetuate poverty and inequality.
AfricLaw 