Human rights in Africa

Human rights have had impact but still hold enormous potential in providing an additional political avenue down which African – and indeed all – governments and other actors can be held to account. Timely assessments of rights adjudication, for example, tend to show that while compliance is highly variable case to case, never mind country to country, the act of claiming rights both deepens democracy and also meets everyday developmental concerns at the household level (Langford et al., 2017). Thinking about rights as providing tools for accountability provides a useful lens for scrutinising most of the issues discussed in this book. But in order to seize these opportunities, it is argued that shifts in prevalent thinking and focus are required. These changes must see a move away from human rights paradigms that are shorn of political edge and critique. Instead, approaches should be grounded in actually existing struggles, imbrications, practices and uses of rights in vastly different African contexts, which may, or may not, be legally driven. Rather than focus on those specific normative staples of the human rights ‘machinery’, namely laws, covenants, treaties, reporting mechanisms, etc., ¹ the chapter instead mainly prioritises looking at some of the most pressing challenges currently constraining deeper realisation of human rights discourse and practice experienced across the continent. The chapter discusses the social construction of rights and then some of the critiques of it as a largely state-centric project as played out in key and yet highly flawed institutions such as the International Criminal Court. The final section then suggests how an apparent impasse in human rights may be assisted by supporting more locally grounded approaches.