Effective Remedy

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The Rise and Rise of Political Backlash: African Union Executive Council’s decision to review the mandate and working methods of the African Commission

August 2, 2018

The latest African Union (AU) Summit, held in Nouakchott, Mauritania, from 25 June to 2 July 2018, has left the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) severely undermined. The Executive Council adopted Decision EX.CL/Dec.1015(XXIII), which endorses some worrying recommendations that emanated from the joint retreat, held in June, by the ACHPR and the Permanent Representatives’ Committee (PRC). The adoption of the Decision has turned the recommendations into binding AU decisions or directives (see Executive Council Rules of Procedure, Rule 34 and Art. 23(2) of the Constitutive Act of the AU). This post reflects on the political motivations for, the legality of, and potential implications of three of these decisions or directives, namely: The decision to review the interpretative mandate of the ACHPR “in light of a similar mandate exercised by the African Court [on Human and Peoples’ Rights] and the potential for conflicting jurisprudence”; The directive to the ACHPR to align its guidelines for granting observer status to NGOs with “the already existing criteria on the accreditation of NGOs to the…

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Supreme Court of Spain: UN Treaty Body individual decisions are legally binding

August 1, 2018

The Spanish Supreme Court has established that the views expressed by UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies in individual complaints are binding on the State. The Court ordered Spain to pay €600,000 in compensation to Ángela González for the responsibility of its authorities in relation to the death of her daughter. Her daughter was murdered by her father in…

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Part 2: A few steps forward, a few steps sideways and a few steps backwards: The CAT’s revised and updated GC on Non-Refoulement

March 21, 2018

CAT’s Defiance in Response to State Pushback In Part I of our analysis of the new CAT General Comment, we noted that state pushback on a range of issues, for example diplomatic assurances and post deportation redress, was successful as evidenced by the committee’s amendments to the now adopted GC.  In this post,…

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Part 1: A few steps forward, a few steps sideways and a few steps backwards: The CAT’s revised and updated GC on Non-Refoulement

March 20, 2018

On 6 December 2017, after a year long consultation process with states and civil society representatives, the Committee against Torture (CAT) adopted its revised General Comment (GC) (now No.4) on the implementation of Article 3 of the Convention against Torture (the Convention)  in the context of Article 22. In a decaying global human…

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Can the ECtHR provide an effective remedy following the coup d’état and declaration of emergency in Turkey?

March 19, 2018

The question posed in the title of this post has been discussed in various blogs suggesting that recent decisions of the ECtHR rejecting cases for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies have been politically motivated.  I recently discussed this issue at a meeting organised by the Law Society in conjunction with the German Bar Association (DAV) in Berlin on 5th…

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