The Role of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Promoting the Socio-Economic Rights of Migrants

In 1969, African leaders adopted the region’s first human rights instrument, the Organisation of the African Union Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. Over the next four decades, three key human rights treaties entered into force, expanding on the entitlements of refugees and asylum seekers (RAS). Despite these frameworks, the exclusion of RAS from social security interventions remains pervasive across many host African countries. This setback has driven a disproportionate percentage of this vulnerable population into abject deprivation, hunger and poverty. Against this backdrop, the central research question is: How can the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Court) contribute to alleviating the socio-economic hardship of RAS? To this end, this chapter argues that the African Court could improve the socio-economic conditions of migrants by advocating for their inclusion in the conventional social security structure of host states. This chapter, however, argues that the optimism around the African Court’s intervention is likely to wane unless it takes bold steps in overcoming the normative and institutional constraints that hinder its effectiveness towards developing a timely jurisprudence on social security.