Opportunity to reshape human rights justice in Africa – African Court President
The year 2022 will offer Africans the opportunity to reshape human rights justice which calls for all stakeholders to build an alliance towards three main achievements.
The three main targets are to pursue quality justice, place States at the heart of the discourse on human rights justice, and devise strategies to promote Africa’s contribution to overcome the global and regional democracy crisis Lady Justice Imani D. Aboud, President of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights has stated.
Lady Justice Aboud told the Ghana News Agency in an interview on projections for this year that in the past two years, the African Court had adjusted itself to the fast-changing nature of international human rights justice, especially in dealing with the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
She said the achievements of the African Continental Court since the advent of the pandemic reveal a consistent trend of increased productivity despite the difficulty of holding in-person sessions, it has almost doubled its judicial output by delivering several judgments in a calendar year.
The African Court President noted that 2022 was with its own peculiar challenges; “as a judicial institution, the African Court will certainly encounter challenges that are common to the administration of justice in Africa during a time justice will remain largely virtual.
“These challenges include; upholding fair trial rights, developing adequate solutions to an emerging socio-political litigation, and enforcing effective remedies in an era of increased assertion of sovereignty by States”.
Lady Justice Aboud noted that the African Court must also grapple with the crucial need to capitalize on its now well established operational capacity to harness quality and greater authority.
“Realising this aim necessarily involves both internal institutional reform, but certainly requires external stakeholders to reinvent their judicial engagement in a way that helps the African Court unleash its full justice-delivering potential, as envisaged by the African Union and fervently awaited by Africans,” she said.
Source: GNA