February 2014

AJIL Symposium: Can the ECOWAS Court Revive Regionalism Through Human Rights?

[Dr. Horace S. Adjolohoun is a Senior Legal Expert at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. He recently completed his LLD thesis on Giving Effect to the Human Rights Jurisprudence of the ECOWAS Court of Justice: Compliance and Influence at the University of Pretoria.] I agree with Alter, Helfer and McAllister that progressive judicial lawmaking may be risky, particularly in an environment where domestic politics are not in favor of a supranational court that limits the sovereignty margin of state organs. In the context of the ECOWAS Court of Justice (ECCJ), an interesting question could therefore be whether, by a purposive adjudication, the Court could read community law through its human rights mandate. The Court has repeatedly given a negative answer, and many have warned of the related risks, particular bearing in mind the fall of the SADC Tribunal. An association of factors makes me suggest that the chance could be worth taking. The ECCJ is the official judicial body in which ECOWAS has vested the mandate to oversee the interpretation and application of norms adopted under the aegis of the Community (‘original’ Community law). I suggest that the African Charter has acquired the status of Community law because of its 'constructive' incorporation in ECOWAS instruments, particularly the 1993 Revised Treaty and the 2001 Governance Protocol. On the basis of the 2005 Court Protocol, the ECCJ has confirmed that status through its successive human rights judgments, starting from the first one in 2005. Article 31(1) VCLTTreaty law commands that interpretation of conventions should follow the ordinary meaning and not expand beyond the initial intention of the parties. Particularly, in the framework of regional integration arrangements, the ‘agency’ doctrine suggests that the Agent (here the ECCJ) may not usurp legislative functions by either interpreting the silence of the law in a particular direction (which I argue the ECCJ did in the Ugokwe case) or – and thereby – generating new norms that were not expressly formulated by law-makers (here, state parties)  (see Stone Sweet, 10-15). Some of the authors of the lead article support that approach in a previous work. I agree that the silence of the 2005 Protocol regarding the well established international customary law rule of exhaustion of domestic remedies is as plain as was the lack of direct access for private litigants in the Afolabi era. Despite this, the ECCJ’s judges espoused purposive – and, in my view, ‘progressive’ – judicial lawmaking regarding exhaustion. The ECOWAS human rights ‘regime’ borrows from the African Charter-based system, which poses seven admissibility requirements for complaints to be accepted by the African Court and Commission. In the practice of the Commission, the rule of exhaustion is by far the one that attracts more contention. The 2005 ECCJ Protocol provides for ‘non-anonymity’ and ‘non-pendency’ as the two admissibility conditions. From the foregoing, it is surprising that, in the course of lawmaking, ECOWAS states provided expressly for two ‘minor’ conditions, and remained silent for a ‘major’ condition, which has always attracted dispute.

AJIL Symposium: Regional Courts, Regionalism, Critical Junctures and Economic Integration in Africa

[Dr. Kofi Oteng Kufuor is a Professor at the University of East London, UK.] In November 2013 the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice threw out a case brought before it by Nigerian traders seeking a judgment that Ghana’s investment legislation which discriminated against ECOWAS nationals was inconsistent with ECOWAS law. The decision by the Court was surprising not only on account of it being a setback to the ECOWAS goals of a single economic market but it was also a blow to the supranational regime that the members created with the adoption of the Revised ECOWAS Treaty. Moreover, this decision was even more astonishing as it went against ECOWAS law and related protocols on the free movement of persons, right of residence and establishment. The decision was also surprising in the wake of the efforts by the Court, carefully outlined in the paper “A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice" by Alter, Helfer and McAllister (AHM), to extend its power. The research by AHM states that in the early stages of the Court’s power grab, economic union was sacrificed for the protection of human rights. At the core of the paper by AHM is that a constellation of actors, driven by a variety of interests, came together at a critical juncture in ECOWAS politics – there was widespread concern about the respect for human rights and humanitarian law - and this meeting of persons and policy space created an opportunity for the Court to expand its reach into the realm of human rights. However, if we accept the core arguments of public choice theory then the Court could have exploited the petition before it to seize more power for itself. Thus public choice theorists studying international organizations will be surprised to see that this supranational moment has slipped especially with regard to an organization that still has compliance and legitimacy problems. AHM assert that the decision to allow private interests to bring human rights suits before the ECOWAS Court was done at the expense of the Court serving as an engine for realizing the economic integration objective. The inference from this is that while a critical juncture appeared and thus an opportunity seized in the name of human rights, a similar opportunity is yet to come into existence for economic interests. However, looking at the rejection of the traders’ suit from a non-economic “irrational” point of view, the ECOWAS Court has struck a blow for re-connecting markets to society by abating neoliberal economic openness that subordinate Ghana’s investment law to ECOWAS law. Was the Court able to do so because the kind of interests that birthed the Court’s rights moment did not exist at the regional level? Inferred from AHM’s work the answer seems to be yes.

AJIL Symposium: Comment on “A new International Human Rights Court for West Africa”

[Dr. Solomon T. Ebobrah is a Senior Lecturer at Niger Delta University.]

To date, ‘A new International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice’ authored by Karen Alter, Larry Helfer and Jacqueline McAllister is arguably the most eloquent scholarly exposition on the human rights jurisdiction of the ECOWAS Court of Justice (ECCJ) by observers from outside the African continent. This brilliant piece of work is to my knowledge, also the only one yet in existence to have taken a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the ECCJ. Based on their very thorough and painstaking empirical investigation, the authors have successfully (in my view) supplied answers to some of the nagging questions that political scientists and lawyers would have regarding the budding human rights mandate of the ECCJ. As they point out in their opening remarks, intrigued (as the rest of us are) by the sharp but successful redeployment of the ECCJ from its original objectives of providing support economic integration to a seemingly more popular but secondary role as an international human rights court, the authors apply this article for the purpose trying understand and explain the rationale and manner of this transformation.

The authors have made very compelling arguments in support of their theoretical claim that international institutions, including international courts adapt to changing norms and societal pressures such that rational functionalist goals do not exclusively determine how a given international institution ultimately turns after its creation. While I find myself in agreement with much of the article, it is in relation to this claim and the evidence supplied by the authors in proof thereof that I find my first challenge.

AJIL Symposium: Introduction to “A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice”

[Karen J. Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University, Laurence R. Helfer is the Harry R. Chadwick, Sr. Professor of Law at Duke University, and Jacqueline McAllister is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College (as of July 2014).] The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice is an increasingly active and surprisingly bold adjudicator of human rights cases.  Since acquiring a human rights jurisdiction in 2005, the ECOWAS Court has issued more than 50 decisions relating to alleged rights violations by 15 West African states. The Court’s path-breaking cases include judgments against Niger for condoning modern forms of slavery, against Nigeria for impeding the right to free basic education for children, and against the Gambia for the torture of dissident journalists. A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, recently published in AJIL, explains how a sub-regional tribunal first established to help build a common market was later redeployed as a human rights court.  We investigate why West African governments—which set up the Court in a way that has allowed persistent flouting of ECOWAS economic rules—later delegated to ECOWAS judges a remarkably expansive human rights jurisdiction over suits filed by individuals and NGOs. Our theoretical contribution explains how international institutions, including courts, evolve over time in response to political contestation and societal pressures.  We show how humanitarian interventions in West Africa in the 1990s created a demand to expand ECOWAS’s security and human rights mandates.  These events, in turn, triggered a cascade of smaller reforms in the Community that, in the mid-2000s, created an opening for an alliance of civil society groups and supranational actors to mobilize in favor of court reform. The creation of a human rights court in West Africa may surprise many readers of this blog. Readers mostly familiar with global bodies like the ICJ, the WTO and the ICC, or regional bodies in Europe and the Americas, may be unaware that Africa also has active international courts that litigate important cases.  Given that ECOWAS’ primary mandate is to promote economic integration, we wanted to understand why its court exercises such far-reaching human rights jurisdiction.  Given that several ECOWAS member states have yet to accept the jurisdiction of the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights, the ECOWAS Court’s ability to entertain private litigant complaints—without first requiring the exhaustion of domestic remedies—is especially surprising.  We also expected that even if ECOWAS member states decided to create such a tribunal, they would have included robust political checks to control the judges and their rulings. What we found—based on a review of ECOWAS Court decisions and more than two dozen interviews with judges, Community officers, government officials, attorneys, and NGOs—was quite different.  The member states not only gave Court a capacious human rights jurisdiction, they also rejected opportunities to narrow the Court’s authority. Our AJIL article emphasizes several interesting dimensions of the ECOWAS Court’s repurposing and subsequent survival as an international human rights tribunal.