Statements and Submissions Before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights
Before the 68th General Session
Before the 67th General Session
The lives of prisoners matter. They should not endure in addition to their detention, the significantly hired threat of contracting a deadly disease and of suffering more significant consequences from it because of inadequate medical care.
Climate change represents a serious threat to multiple human rights, including the rights to movement, to health, water, food, housing, self-determination, and sustainable development. However, most people in the developed world live in denial that obstructs action to protect vulnerable people.
International-Lawyers.Org takes this opportunity to appreciate the commitment of Commissioners in this difficult time. We welcome their continuing their work and note that the people who need them have increased during the current pandemic.
Before the 63rd General Session
Although many cases of ill treatment have been brought to the attention to the Commission and despite communicating concerns to the authorities, no action has been taken to improve the conditions of detention of helpless people under the control of the prison authorities.
Egypt has continually imposed restrictions on the work of civil society and human rights defenders through laws that impede their proper functioning. These restrictions include limits on foreign funding that give the Egyptian authorities wide discretion to dissolve them. But since 2014, the crackdown and intimidation against civil society and human rights defenders have reached unprecedented levels.
The death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment. International-Lawyers.Org opposes it in all circumstances and call on African States to join the international abolitionist movement by ratifying the second optional protocol of ICCPR, adopt national laws to eradicate it.
Before the 62nd General Session
International-Lawyers.Org encourages African States to hold fair and free elections that respect the rule of law, their Constitutions, and ensure all their citizens without discrimination to participate as voters and/or candidates.
We note the plight of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a Member State of the African Union, remains of great concerns because of the serious and massive violations of human rights of the Sahrawi people that continue to be perpetrated by Morocco with virtual impunity.
International-Lawyers.Org welcomes the Activity Report of the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders in Africa.
International Lawyers.org is deeply concerned by the disturbing trend of increase of death penalties in countries in Africa including Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan.
International-Lawyers.Org also draws attention to the increasingly important issue of the extractions of natural resources in African, the planet’s most natural resources rich continent. We note that while resource extraction continues to move forward at high rate to satisfy the increasing demands of developed countries, many African countries are being left behind as profits—and as a consequence the social benefits—gained from natural resources do not remain on the continent.
We therefore urge the Commission to heighten its efforts to advocate on behalf of refugees and displaced persons in African, not only among African States, but in forums that call upon all States to show solidarity with refugees and displaced persons through meaningful cooperation that is measured by how well a more equitable social and economic order is achieved.
Before the 61st General Session
International-Lawyer.Org welcomes the Commission’s adoption of Resolution375 on the Right to Life in Africa, ACHPR/Res/ 375 (LX) 2017 and its call for Member States who have adopted a moratorium to ensure its effective implementation and for Member States that have not yet adopted a moratorium to do so as quickly as possible.
International-Lawyers.Org remains concerned with the number of allegations of torture emanating from both international and national sources in Africa.
International-Lawyers.Org seeks to draw the Commission’s attention to the role of international law in the National Migration Policies that we are aware are in the progress of being drafted by African countries, especially here in West Africa.
International-Lawyers.Org is increasing concerned about the conditions in prisons in Africa. Often medical treatment, proper sanitation, and nutrition are lacking. Overcrowding is endemic across the continent. In addition, poorly trained and paid prison officials often lack the skills to deal competently and humanely with prisoners.
International-Lawyers.Org again expresses its appreciation to the Commission for the drafting and adoption of the text in January 2016 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Older Persons in Africa to promote and protect the rights of Older Persons.
International-Lawyers.Org welcomed warmly and with enthusiasm the Commission’s decision to create a Working Group on Economic and Social Rights, but we regret the apparent deterioration of the work of this body, which we understand has not met regularly as was intended.
Communications—conveying as well as receiving information—is essential to participation in the government of one’s own country. It is important to the accountability of government and intergovernmental institutions. By restricting access to the internet, individuals and groups of individuals are denied the right to take part in the political, social, and cultural life of their country. Today, access to the internet is as important as access to a bed to sleep in or a roof over one’s head.
International-Lawyers.Org continues to be concerned with the challenges and sometimes dangers that human rights defenders face in carrying out their activities in African countries.
International-Lawyers.Org wishes to highlight the right of access to clean water that is increasingly putting an untenable burden on women and girls. Often it is women and girls who suffer the most from the lack of clean water in their homes and lack of adequate sanitation. This is a problem Member States can overcome if they have the will.
International-Lawyers.Org congratulates the Commission on the 30th Anniversary of its work. In the past three decades the Commission has made significant contributions to promoting and protecting the human rights of Africans. The Commission has been a leader—both in Africa and worldwide—in protecting economic and social rights. The Commission has been almost unique in protecting peoples’ rights. And the Commission has provided an extraordinary contribution to promoting human and peoples’ rights.
Before the 60th General Session
We recognize that Africa is both the origin and recipient of more refugees and displaced persons than any other part of the world. Despite this fact, more attention is paid to refugees leaving Africa than those staying within the continent. The amount of resources devoted by the international community to assisting refugees and displaced people coming from or moving to an African country or within African countries is a fraction of the resources European countries are devoting to preventing and vetting refugees from Africa to their borders.
International-Lawyers.Org welcomes the Activity Report of Chairperson of the Working Group on the Rights of Older Persons and People with Disabilities in Africa. We welcome the adoption of both the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Older Persons in Africa and the Draft Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Africa.
International-Lawyers.Org is especially concerned about the numerous reports of abuse of prisoners that has been reported in Egypt.
International-Lawyers.Org welcomes the Activity Report of the Chairperson of the Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations in Africa. We welcome the attention to agreements concerning the extraction of resources which often offer unfair terms to African States, which are often dictated by large powerful multinational corporations many of which are supported by wealthy countries that exercise pressure in favour of these companies.
Before the 58th General Session
International-Lawyers.Org is concerned with the increasing deterioration of prison conditions in countries where the government are either unable or unwilling to ensure humane conditions for prisoners. We therefore seek the particular attention of the Special Rapporteur on Prisons, Conditions of Detention and Policing in Africa for situations where the State has deteriorated into a situation of chaos such as Libya and where the government has shown itself to be unwilling to treat prisoners humanely such as Egypt.
We recognize that Africa has often been a leading light in the development of human rights. While European and Asian empires were at war with each other, Africans were often building bridges of peaceful cooperation. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights is an enlightened document. Perhaps more enlightened than any other general regional human rights treaty in the world today.
Before the 57th General Session
We are concerned by the continuing use of arbitrary detention and the death penalty, sometimes en masse, in the Egypt's efforts to fight the mounting violence in the country. During 2015, the Commission adopt provisional measures requesting the Egyptian government to refrain from carrying out the death penalty against seven Complainants in two communications before the Commission. The Egyptian government ignored these requests and executed the individuals involved.
It is because the treatment of its prisoners is such an important barometer for a State’s respect for human rights that we urge the Commission’s attention for the human rights abuses committed in Egyptian Detention facilities since the African Union determined that many of the same individuals who are still governing Egypt today were responsible for an unconstitutional change of government in July 2013.