Abstract:
In 2012, the abolition of individual access to the Southern Africa
Development Community Tribunal all but put a final nail to the budding
human rights regime that was growing in the region. However, the two
other main sub-regional human rights regimes in Africa continued to grow
from strength to strength: in East Africa under the East African Community
framework and in West Africa under the Economic Community of West
African States framework. With the increasing involvement of these subregional
regimes in the field of human rights, the African Charter is being
applied in an unprecedented way in a manner that penetrates the shield
of national sovereignty and in areas where continental human rights
structures may have taken time to reach. Taking the view that this trend
calls for stakeholders to pay more attention to the work of these subregional
human rights regimes in order to ensure quality control and
maintain legitimacy of the overall African human rights system, this
contribution undertakes a descriptive analysis of the most significant
judicial and non-juridical human rights developments that occurred in
these sub-regions during 2012.
