By Brendan Sweeney
In an exciting new development, which will encourage dialogue between the world’s most important human rights defenders, the first colloquium of the African, European and Inter-American human rights courts took place in Berlin 3-7 August 2009.
The main goal of the colloquium was to give judges from the African human rights court – which is a newcomer compared to its international counterparts - the opportunity to benefit from the experiences of their European and Inter-American colleagues.
The European Court of Human Rights, which was established as far back as 1959, delivered its first judgment in 1961, while the Inter-American Court of Human Rights - inaugurated in 1979 - delivered its first judgment in 1988. However, the African Court appointed its first judges as late as 2006 and the Court has still to pass its first judgment.
No global human rights court exists as yet, which means that the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights are the main bodies able to make binding judicial decisions on alleged human rights violations by states.
The colloquium was organised by GTZ, an international cooperation enterprise for sustainable development owned by the German state, to support the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights but the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) also played an important role.
To moderate the discussions, GTZ invited Jonas Christoffersen, Executive Director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, to provide the European perspective while James Cavallaro, Clinical Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School, provided the American perspective.
Ulrik Spliid, Senior Legal Advisor at DIHR, was also invited to participate and took over the co-moderation from Jonas Christoffersen on the last two days of the colloquium.
Jonas Christoffersen was very pleased to be participating in such an important event: “Hopefully we contributed meaningfully to the broad range of topics covered by the colloquium, ranging from substantive human rights law, such as the European case law on life, liberty and the prohibition of torture, to issues of a more procedural nature, such as the ways to secure compliance with decisions.”.
He continued: “Even though both the Inter-American and the European human right systems can find valuable inspiration in the African Human Rights system’s focus on collective rights in addition to individual rights, the colloquium will be rated a success if the newest addition to the world’s human rights courts, the African Court, can use the inspiration from the two older courts to avoid some of the pitfalls that inevitably threaten a new human rights court.”
Among the issues discussed was compliance, which is of vital importance for all international courts since - unlike domestic courts - they do not have any means of enforcing their decisions.
According to Ulrik Spliid, who is an expert on the African human rights system at DIHR: “The previous experiences in Africa with respect to adherence to human right decisions have not been too promising. According to a study by the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, only 14 per cent of the admittedly non-binding recommendations of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in the period 1994-2004 were fully implemented and another 32 per cent were partly implemented. The experience of the sub-regional African courts dealing with human rights, the ECOWAS court, which covers West Africa, and the SADC tribunal, which covers the southern part of Africa, has been mixed as well.”
In Europe, the compliance rate used to be practically 100% but this has deteriorated somewhat with the entry of countries such as Russia into the European Council. The Inter-American Court has also struggled with a lack of compliance.
To tackle this problem, the Inter-American Court now requests state parties found guilty of a violations to deliver reports on compliance, issue resolutions and carry out hearings on this subject if this is necessary. “The experience from the Inter-American Court is especially interesting in the African context since the wording of the protocol on compliance establishing the African Court seems to have been copied directly from the American Convention on Human Rights,” stresses Ulrik Spliid.
Jonas Christoffersen was also enthusiastic about future contacts between the African Court and its counterpart in the Americas:
“It is relevant to keep in mind, that whereas the European system was originally set up by countries that had already achieved some sort of democratic governance, both the Inter-American system and the African system were set up by states attempting to establish a culture of human rights while striving simultaneously to achieve true democracy. Consequently, it was a very positive tangible result of the colloquium that at the end the president of the African Court, Jean Mutsinzi from Rwanda, and the president of the Inter-American Court, Cecilia Medina Quiroga from Chile, announced that these two courts would start talks to enter into a formal partnership”, he concluded.
DIHR is currently in talks with the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights concerning possible collaboration and it is expected that a partnership agreement will be finalised before the end of 2009.
For further information, please contact Brendan Sweeney at