Spotlight on death penalty at Africa’s human rights court

On Friday, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights delivered a clutch of new decisions. As she read them, Carmel Rickard realised that they were like an iceberg, with a lot more going on behind the words, and below the surface, than meets the eye. In her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, she explains that, for example, there are differences among the judges of this court on the hot-button topic of the death penalty. Similarly, there are obvious differences between this court’s jurisprudence on the issue and that of the courts of the host country, Tanzania.