African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights

The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, also called the Banjul Charter, is the regional human rights treaty of the African continent. The Organization of African Unity, predecessor of the African Union, commissioned a committee of experts in 1979 to draft a continental human rights instrument comparable to those already adopted in Europe and the Americas, and the resulting Charter was unanimously approved at the OAU's 18th Assembly in Nairobi in June 1981. It entered into force on 21 October 1986, a date now marked annually as African Human Rights Day, once a simple majority of member states had ratified it, and all 53 African states have since done so. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, established in Addis Ababa in November 1987 and headquartered in Banjul, Gambia, oversees the Charter's implementation and interpretation, and a 1998 protocol created the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, which became operational in 2006.