African Commission on Human and People's Rights

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The Mauritius Oil Spill: Using Africa’s ‘judicial environmentalism’ as an avenue for redress?

Since the MV Wakashio ship ran aground on 25 July this year, Mauritius has been facing an unfolding human and environmental disaster. Up to 100,000 Mauritians took to the streets in late August to protest against the State’s handling of the disaster, one of the largest protests in the country in over 40 years. In this post we explore the potential for Mauritians to use the African human rights system to address the State’s handling of the oil spill, and whether the acts and omissions of Mauritius potentially violated the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter), which includes environmental rights. Such a route may be underexplored but it is not without precedent. This post will review the occurrence of ‘Judicial environmentalism’ before Africa’s Regional Economic Community (REC) Courts and two of the main bodies in the African human rights system: the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission), and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Court). Context There were thousands…

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Two Times Too Many: Botswana and the Death Penalty

Without wanting to trivialise the hard work needed to litigate human rights cases, it is often implementation that is considered the pinnacle of achievement. Put simply, it is one thing to convince a commission or court that a countries’ policies or actions contravene a human rights instrument, it is quite another for that country to implement the decision.

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