By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu*
Member states of the African Union (AU) will hold their most consequential election of the year in February 2026, to fill ten vacancies in continental human rights institutions.
They will elect three experts to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and seven to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.
These individuals will serve on the committee for five years and on the commission for six, alongside 23 peers with unexpired terms.
The elections are important because these institutions exist primarily to ensure that the continent’s governments take African lives seriously. They are entrusted with ensuring that Africans live in dignity and equality. This is a difficult task in a continent where human rights often sound hollow or precarious.
As a scholar who studies Africa’s regional institutions, I find that they are deeply underestimated. Yet, these institutions have considerable powers to undertake investigations and issue decisions against African governments. Their decisions can attract serious sanctions if disregarded.
Recent events show why these institutions continue to matter. Several AU treaties, particularly the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, protect the right to vote and mandate independent and impartial courts as arbiters of election disputes.
However, most of Africa’s elections are now more poorly managed than ever before. In 2025 alone – in Cameroon, Côte d‘Ivoire and Tanzania, among others – thousands of Africans were killed in state-sponsored election violence.
In many African countries, the judiciary and other independent institutions face attacks or are captured by politicians, depriving people of legal recourse.
This has contributed to deepening civic apathy, a creeping return of military and authoritarian rule, and further erosion of democratic governance.
Of course, treaty institutions do not organise or supervise national elections. But they can counter authoritarianism by mobilising responses to the underlying causes of rigged elections.
This is why Africans everywhere should show an interest in the process and outcome of the African Union’s February 2026 elections for continental human rights institutions. They protect the continent’s citizens and communities.
Good intentions, poor outcomes
When the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) elected the pioneer experts to the African Commission in 1987, most were senior ministers from dictatorships.
Today, the AU no longer elects obvious politicians to these bodies. Still, the candidates are mostly aligned with ruling African governments.
This was not the intention. The continental institutions were created to respond when, for instance, governments attacked protesters, shut down the internet, displaced communities without compensation, or hijacked elections.
The institutions are Africa’s official human rights enforcers. They should ensure that governments uphold the principles and values they have undertaken under continental treaties. Those include “respect for democratic principles, human rights, the rule of law and good governance” and “respect for the sanctity of human life”.
For this reason, the treaties only allow to be elected to these roles “African personalities of the highest reputation, known for their high morality, integrity, impartiality, and competence in matters of human and peoples’ rights.” Such individuals work in their personal capacities and not as stooges of any government.
In practice, these criteria are not always met.
Regrettably, most Africans are unaware that these mechanisms exist. That affects the credibility of the selection process.
The AU doesn’t give the selection much publicity. Although it nominally encourages member states to adopt transparent nomination processes, most states prefer to keep their nominations ad hoc and opaque.
A 2020 report by Amnesty International described the selection as characterised by “secrecy and largely merit-less national nomination processes”. Three years earlier, the Open Society Justice Initiative and the International Commission of Jurists similarly criticised it as “largely unknown and shrouded in secrecy”.
In 2023, African citizens and civil society instituted the Arusha Initiative to improve citizen awareness, the quality of nominations and the outcomes.
What should happen
These institutions, especially the African Commission and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, exist to foster shared values. They are committed to the rule of law and due process. And they are supposed to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurs and investors, who in turn can help develop the continent.
By protecting labour and land rights, these mechanisms guide states in implementing socio-economic rights in Africa and support innovation. By addressing all forms of discrimination, including xenophobia, they can also encourage mobility across the continent.
By advancing jurisprudence on free movement as a human right and promoting associated treaties that complement regional integration, these mechanisms could help achieve free movement across Africa.
The institutions could also address environmental degradation, livelihoods and forced displacement. In doing so they would centre the interests of Africa’s indigenous peoples.
Africa’s citizens and communities fund these institutions through their taxes. That alone is reason enough to care about them.
Human rights bodies should not be disembodied entities ministering from distant lands to unrepresented people. Instead, citizens should choose capable, independent experts to protect their livelihoods and futures.
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* * Ikechukwu Uzoma, human rights lawyer and researcher at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center in the US, is co-author of this article.
