Litigating Human Rights Before Sub-Regional Courts in Africa: Prospects and Challenges

One of the consequences of the partitioning of Africa by the colonialists was that at independence, most African states emerged as economically and politically fragile states that experienced difficulty surviving against the forces of superior Western economies. Not surprisingly, as the first waves of independence moved over the continent, nationalist leaders began to call for political and economic integration in order to ensure realist survival of African states. However, not every nationalist was enthusiastic about political and economic integration and this led to a huge ideological divide in the early 1960s. The result of this ideological divide was that the intended ‘United States of Africa’ did not materialise immediately after independence. Instead, a relatively weak political integration process began at the continental level with the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. Not surprisingly, it was at the sub-regional level that economic integration began in Africa. At inception, regional economic communities (RECs) in Africa generally stuck with their economic focus leaving the political issues to the wider continental forum. With respect to human rights, the feeling among some African leaders was that the issue was too political and could be used as a ‘pretext for intervening in their countries’ internal affairs’ hence it was argued that the ‘treatment of human rights more appropriately belonged in other international fora’. Despite this feeling, it is on record that human rights were successfully introduced in the otherwise strictly economic relation between the European Economic Community (EEC) and the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) states in 1978.