The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights: A New Jurisdictional Frontier

• In Event: Human Rights, Migrants, and the Law

Abstract

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was finally established in 2004 after a contentious founding process that stretched back to 1961. Despite forty years of obstruction and disinterest from governments who were deeply reluctant to delegate sovereignty over human rights to a supranational body, the African Convention on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Protocol grant the ACtHPR far-reaching authority relative to other regional human rights courts. In many ways, the ACtHPR’s substantive and temporal jurisdiction is less constrained than that of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and, to an even greater extent, the European Court of Human Rights. What explains this variation across the boundaries of these courts’ jurisdictions? What can this variation tell us about the mechanics of delegation to international courts (ICs)? I argue that the ability of legal bureaucrats to capture control over vital stages in the drafting of an IC’s constitutive documents, thus limiting the influence of political advisors, yields institutional design arrangements that imbue the IC with broader formal jurisdiction as well as greater flexibility to variably interpret that jurisdiction over time.

Author

• Maria Sanchez, University of Minnesota