Are we really on the same page? Understanding the distortion of human rights law in Africa by anti-rights actors

	Author: Lakshita Kanhiya Legal Associate, Initiative for Strategic Litigation (ISLA) in Africa
	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 most 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 which 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.

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