Abstract:
Over the last six decades, the international human rights discourse shifted
from celebrating ever-expanding substantive normative frameworks to questioning the inadequacies in the implementation and enforcement of these norms. Concomitant with this development came greater interest
in human rights treaty bodies and human rights courts, leading to more
attention being paid to election processes and an increased awareness of
the role played by the individual members of these bodies. In this contribution,
the focus falls on the four new members of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission), who took their seats at the Commission’s 38th ordinary session, held from 21 November
to 5 December 2005, in Banjul, The Gambia. Departing from the premise that an institution is its people, and that it is instructive to get to know
these four new commissioners, I conducted interviews with each of the four new commissioners during that session.
