ECOWAS Court, Pan-African Lawyers Union to Collaborate on Litigations, Enforcement of Judgments

Michael Olugbode in Abuja

The ECOWAS Court of Justice and the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU) have agreed on collaboration on litigations and enforcement of the judgments.
This was disclosed at a two-day seminar organised by PALU with support from the Rahul Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the weekend in Abuja.

The programme officer of the Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU), Praise-God Joseph, said there is a collaboration between ECOWAS Court and PALU on how litigants can access the court as they hope to create more awareness on the need for member states to enforce judgements of the court.
She said: “First is for them to understand that these courts are the ones who accepted their jurisdiction and established them knowing the importance of this court and also knowing that this court provides decisions which are binding.
“So it is upon the states to implement them and also the last thing that we have seen as an initiative towards ensuring they implement the judgment is to provide advocacy about the decisions that we get from this regional court and also sensitizing our member states to know these decisions and also to find initiatives towards implementing the decisions.”

She added that: “Through this publication and also the two-day seminar is to ensure that litigants have been equipped with the knowledge of the regional court. That means it’s jurisdiction and procedures of accessing the court, but also understand how they can advocate towards the implementation of the decisions rendered by the regional court. Through this, we are able to strategize and discuss on what initiatives in case they call us we can implement in our respective organisations and also we can collaborate as partners towards enforcement of decisions of regional courts.

“And on our collaboration with the ECOWAS Court of Justice, we have been working together through different strategic litigations but also mostly through capacity buildings and conferences where we aim to build key stakeholders knowledge about the court but also collaborations on how we as litigants and strategic litigants can access the ECOWAS court mostly.”

She also spoke on PALU and its importance, stating that: “@Pan African Lawyers union deals with different issues and most of our activities are around strategic litigation so through this strategic litigation we do capacity building to litigants but also we do publications so as to help litigants in accessing justice through regional court.

“So, we organised a two-day seminar which aims for capacity building of participants, litigants, CSOs, NHRIS across the region with the focus of those litigates at the ECOWAS court of Justice.”
The programme officer of Rahul institute for human rights and humanitarian law, Gilford Kimathi, said Rahul sponsored the training because of its interest in building capacity of litigants to promote justice.

His words: “We support access to Justice so we support the Pan African lawyers union in its work that supports both the sub-regional bodies that are working on human rights as well as building the capacity of lawyers especially those that are litigating these bodies.

“We hope to have the litigants have increased awareness and therefore strengthen their capacity to engage with the ECOWAS court.
“One of the challenges that we have is that there is limited awareness of these bodies by many of the advocates we use to have many other challenges like the low levels of implementation of decisions that emanate from those bodies amongst other challenges as you may know therefore our expectation is that through the seminar that was organized by PALU as well as the publication the menu that has been developed by PALU the litigants will be more capacitated to be able to litigate at the ECOWAS court.”
The Registrar Appeal, Arbitration and Enforcement, ECOWAS Court of Justice, Mr. Gaye Sowe, at the sidelines said, the court has gotten an approval to be at the next ECOWAS Council of Ministers meeting to present it with their challenges and possible solutions.
Sowe said: “For the first time the court is going to meet with the council of Ministers which has never happened before. We will be at the meeting and make known to them the challenges we face a regional court and proffer possible solutions.”,
Earlier in his presentation he disclosed that the court has so far made over 390 judgments since inception and that 132 cases against member states are yet to be enforced while 14 has so far been enforced and that the other over 200 judgements are not enforceable.