Promising profiles : an interview with the four new members of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights : recent developments

Abstract

Over the last six decades, the international human rights discourse shifted from celebrating ever-expanding substantive normative frameworks to questioning the inadequacies in the implementation and enforcement of these norms. Concomitant with this development came greater interest in human rights treaty bodies and human rights courts, leading to more attention being paid to election processes and an increased awareness of the role played by the individual members of these bodies. In this contribution, the focus falls on the four new members of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission), who took their seats at the Commission’s 38th ordinary session, held from 21 November to 5 December 2005, in Banjul, The Gambia. Departing from the premise that an institution is its people, and that it is instructive to get to know these four new commissioners, I conducted interviews with each of the four new commissioners during that session.