Implementing Human Rights in Africa
The African Commission on Human &
Peoples' Rights & Individual Communications

By Inger Osterdahl
November 2002
Iustus Forlag
ISBN: 91-7678-500-9
223 pages, 5 7/8 x 8 3/4"
$75.00 hardcover

---

The possibility of individual complaints gives teeth to a human rights convention. This book concerns the way in which individual communications under the African Charter on Human and People's Rights are handled by the African Commission on Human and People's Rights. The African Commission has faced considerable procedural problems in its effort to enforce the rights and freedoms of the Charter.

These problems by now have been mostly solved, often in imaginative and original ways. This book takes up some of the problems as well as the solutions found by the African Commission. The actual role of the courts in the African states, as it appears from the communications submitted to the Commission, as well as the desired role of the judiciary in the view of the African Commission is also explored.

Contents include: the mandate of the commission, the sources of inspiration, the exhaustion of local remedies, who is the victim?, amicable settlements, procedure under article 58 as created by the commission, presumption of truth, recommendations by the commission, important role of the courts, and a conclusion.

Human Rights; Law
Uppsala University Swedish Institute Studies in International Law No. 15

Return to Coronet Books main page