Abstract:
Most armed conflicts today take place in Africa and it is increasingly
African actors who are engaged in peacekeeping on the continent, yet
scholarly writing on the regulation of these conflicts lags behind. One area
where this is particularly true concerns sanctioning violations of
international humanitarian law. This has long been difficult, given the
tendency of domestic systems to close ranks and insulate their citizens
from legal action. To provide at least some forum for justice in this
situation, regional human rights bodies increasingly deal with rights
violations even in situations of war, raising questions about their mandate
and the relationship between human rights and humanitarian law. In the
European and American context, these questions have already been the
subject of considerable academic writing, but the same is not true for
Africa. This article seeks to fill this gap. It first situates the existing
approach of the major pan-African human rights institutions to
international humanitarian law within the broader global debate. As a
second step, it argues that an interpretive approach which takes
international humanitarian law into consideration when interpreting
rights in the African Charter provides the best approach to this question in
the African context.
