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Locking In Human Rights in Africa: Analyzing State Accession to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights

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Abstract

The establishment of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights was a pivotal moment for the African human rights system. To date, 30 of the African Union’s 55 member states have accepted the Court’s jurisdiction by ratifying the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. This article uses statistical analysis of state action on the Protocol to shed light upon the factors that have led some states to accept the Court’s jurisdiction and other states to thus far decline to do so. The results provide strong support for accounts of the origins of international human rights regimes that emphasize transitional states’ desire to “lock in” new commitments to democracy and human rights. Potential compliance costs, regimes’ ideological orientations, domestic legal traditions, and regional dynamics have also exerted significant effects upon the likelihood of ratification.

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Notes

  1. For an in depth comparison of the three regional human rights systems, see Buergenthal (2006).

  2. Although low in absolute terms and relative to the European human rights system, this is nonetheless comparable to the Inter-American human rights system. Full compliance has occurred in only 12% of the cases in which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has found states responsible for human rights violations, despite the fact that the IACtHR’s decisions are legally binding. See Cavallaro and Brewer (2008).

  3. Although states’ decisions to make the special declaration granting direct access to the ACtHPR to individuals and NGOs represented an even deeper level of commitment, it was not possible to model these decisions in the same way. This was due to the extremely small number of special declarations in the period analyzed and the lack of variation with regard to certain key variables among the states making the declaration.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Texas A&M International University, 5201 University Boulevard, Laredo, TX, 78041, USA

    Simon Zschirnt

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Zschirnt, S. Locking In Human Rights in Africa: Analyzing State Accession to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Hum Rights Rev 19, 97–119 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-018-0492-8

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