2. Regional Human Rights Treaties
Europe, the Americas and Africa all have human rights conventions including judicial or quasi-
judicial systems of enforcement. On 15 September 1994, the Council of the League of Arab
States adopted the fourth regional convention of human rights, the Arab Charter on Human
Rights, which has not entered into force yet.135 Another Human Rights Convention was created
by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS),136 which allows for individual complaints,137
but is not yet functioning. The regional systems operate under different socio-economic and legal
circumstances which also explain to some extent the larger mandate of the African and the Inter-
American Commissions which are endowed with a broad mandate to monitor human rights prac-
tice. Nevertheless, the individual complaint mechanism is a crucial part of enforcing the respec-
tive treaties everywhere. Here again, as with the UN-treaty based system, it is appropriate to say
that the systems are underused,138 with the exception of the ECtHR.139
135 But this Charter does only provide for state-reporting, not for individual complaints to a Human Rights
Commission as other regional bodies (Art. 40, 41). The draft was revised and adopted by the Arab Standing
Committee on Human Rights in January 2004.
136 The Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS Convention) was opened for signature on 26 May 1995 and entered into force on 11 August 1998. It has
been ratified by Belarus, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan as of 15 May 2005.
137 Individual complaints are to be dealt with by a Commission, which issues non-binding views. Interestingly,
Section III (1) of the CIS Convention empowers the CIS Commission to examine “individual and collective
applications submitted by any person or non-governmental organisation concerning matters connected with
human rights violations by any of the Parties and falling within the competence of the Commission”. The
standing requirement is thus very broad.
138 Under the Inter-American system, the caseload of the IACHR is augmenting steadily: from 1997 with 458
applications it went up to 1080 in 2003. The year 2002 saw 4656 petitions, but from those 3763 petitions
referred to the situation of the rights of persons affected by the banking measures "Corralito" in Argentina.
The year 2004 saw 1329 petitions. Those are nevertheless few, in view of the human rights situations in the
Americas. See Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2004;
<http://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/2004eng/chap.3.htm#Statistics>. As for the court, the information is not
provided in a statistical overview, but counting the information on its website, it has delivered 123 decision
and judgments, 19 advisory opinions and ordered in 54 cases preliminary measures as of 14 May 2005; see
<http://www.corteidh.or.cr/juris_ing/index.html>.
There is different information concerning the cases before the African Commission. According to the
University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, at
<http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/africa/comcases/allcases.html>, as of 2002 there were 139 communications
in total, of those 81 communications were brought by NGOs, few of them were filed on behalf of named
individuals, the rest communicated alleged human rights violations without naming the victims. According to
Frans Viljoen, “A Human Rights Court for Africa, and for Africans”, Brooklyn Journal of International Law
30 (2004), 1-66, at 6, from 1988 to 1992, the Commission received some 173 individual complaints, an
average of less than 12 per year, and finalized some 90 communications between 1988 and 2001. According
to Udeme Essien, “African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights: Eleven Years After”, Buffalo
Human Rights Law Review 6 (2000), 93-111, 105, as of 2000 the Commission had received 226
Communications. Of this number, 137 have been finalized and made public, 50 have been declared
inadmissible, six resulted in friendly settlements, five were withdrawn, 88 were pending, 16 had been closed
without decision, and one was a double registration.
139 It is generally recognized that the Court’s excessive caseload (during 2004, some 40.943 new applications
were lodged and at the end of that year, approximately 65.000 applications were pending before it) manifests
itself in two areas in particular: i. processing the very numerous individual applications which are terminated
without a ruling on the merits, usually because they are declared inadmissible (more than 90% of all
applications), and ii. processing individual applications which derive from the same structural cause as an
earlier application which has led to a judgment finding a breach of the Convention (repetitive cases following
a so-called “pilot judgment”). A few figures will illustrate this. In 2004, there were some 20.350 applications
declared inadmissible (or struck off the list of cases), and 830 applications declared admissible. Thus, the
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