‘Saddling’ the New African Regional Human Rights Court with International Criminal Jurisdiction: Innovative, Obstructive, Expedient?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the recent initiative of the African Union ( au ) to amend the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights that initially merged the African Court of Human Peoples’ Rights with the African Court of Justice of the African Union and to now create a new and holistic regional court – the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights – and endow it with jurisdiction for international crimes. The article principally interrogates three issues: (1) the legality and novelty of the au initiative, (2) the question whether the plan is in any way obstructive or a distraction, and (3) whether the initiative is actually necessary when considered against the wider scheme of effective functioning of the au and its human rights protection regimes. The article finds that while the au ’s desire to establish an international crimes chamber within its human rights court may have largely been influenced by the politicisation of the international criminal justice system and its concerns about the icc ’s nearly exclusive focus on Africa, there is nothing in international law that prevents the au from embarking on such initiative. However, it is essential for the au to conduct a necessity test, taking a number of issues into account such as adequate resources, credible legal and political commitment, and the opportunity available to member states in the complementarity principle of the Rome Statute of the icc . It is submitted that since Africa, as a regional block, has accepted the Rome Statute regime in large numbers, the au needs to engage with that system in ways that give African states parties credible ownership of justice, as addressing atrocity crimes would largely be achieved within the domestic systems of member states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".