Yesterday, 10th December was Human Rights Day. It seemed appropriate to choose this day to undertake a roll call of each African Union member state who currently does not allow individuals and NGOs direct access to the Court. (By direct access I mean that individuals or NGOs can file cases themselves before the Court)
So, if you follow The ACtHPR Monitor on twitter you will have seen 47 tweets from me (and if you do not, please consider doing so @acthpr_monitor).
Why do this? Well, I fear that individual countries often get lost in the debate on access (or lack of) to the Court. At The ACtHPR Monitor I often write, discuss and tweet the facts on access: there are 54 African Union member states, of which only seven allow their citizens to take their cases to the Court, about 12 %. This number is unacceptably low and must increase if the Court is to achieve its aim of being a truly continental human rights court. But within the numbers we can lose sight of the individual countries.
So, in a simple exercise I decided to break the numbers down and post a tweet for each country separately; recognizing that for each of those 47 countries not allowing its citizens access to the Court there are many individuals and NGOs affected.
Yes, it was a lot tweets for one day, but I think it was a worthwhile exercise to demonstrate just how far there is to go to achieve universal access to the Court.
We will do the same next year- here’s hoping we have a lot less tweeting to do!