In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Karen Alter, Larry Helfer and Jacqueline McAllister

04 Feb

[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).] Many thanks to Solomon Ebobrah, Kofi Kufuor, and Horace Adjolohoun for their challenging and insightful comments our AJIL article, A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa. We are pleased to have provoked a debate about the drivers of legal integration in Africa and to see this debate linked to a larger set of literatures.  We hope that this symposium will encourage others to investigate the forces that have shaped regional integration projects around the world and to use evidence from ECOWAS to inform regional integration theory in general. Our article attempts to stay on firm empirical ground and to generate as complete and accurate an account of the ECOWAS Court’s transformation as one can have at this moment in time.  But here is the rub—what does it mean to say “at this moment of time?” There were many questions that we could not answer in research conducted only a few years after the events in question. For example, we did not interview the member state officials who debated the expansion of the Court’s jurisdiction.  This was in part due to a lack of time and money, but also because doing so was unlikely to yield different or more complete information.  The decision to extend the Court’s jurisdiction is recent and still contested.  This makes it tricky to interview participants, whose answers may be colored by or speak to the sentiments of the day. Someday, African scholars may write a version of the recent book The Classics of EU Law Revisited, which examines foundational ECJ rulings fifty years later. The passage of time allowed EU historians to access personal archives and analyze the views of key individuals, and thereby reconstruct what happened before, during, and after these rulings.  We look forward to the day that our account of the ECOWAS Court is similarly dissected.  For now, here are our tentative answers to some of the questions raised in this symposium.
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03 Feb

[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.
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