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On Legalism, Popular Agency and "Voices of Suffering": The Nigerian National Human Rights Commission in Context
- Human Rights Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 24, Number 3, August 2002
- pp. 662-720
- 10.1353/hrq.2002.0038
- Article
- Additional Information
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Human Rights Quarterly 24.3 (2002) 662-720
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On Legalism, Popular Agency and "Voices of Suffering":
The Nigerian National Human Rights Commission in Context 1
Obiora Chinedu Okafor &
Shedrack C. Agbakwa
The struggle for human rights will be won or lost at the national level. Unless we [i.e. international human rights scholars] begin to study such struggles, we will neither understand the most important issues nor be able to make the most effective possible contribution to the realization of internationally recognized human rights.
Jack Donnelly 2 [End Page 662]
The . . . [Commission] is modest in its objectives and flexible in its means.
Obinna Okere 3
[For human rights to really connect with human suffering] . . . suffering humanity [must be allowed to] reflect . . . [and] thinking humanity [must] suffer.
Upendra Baxi 4
I. Introduction
It is increasingly being recognized in the relevant literature that, important as they obviously are, international institutions cannot in themselves suffice as the primary sites of the struggle(s) for human rights. 5 Concomitantly, it has become as apparent that these imperative struggles must be won (or lost) largely at the local level. 6 This realization has in turn exposed the critical necessity for the deployment at the national level of various kinds of resources for the promotion and protection of human rights. One of the resources that could be so deployed is a national institution for the promotion and protection of human rights. While recognizing the inherent difficulties with definitions, the United Nations has defined such a national institution as a body that has been established by a Government under the constitution, or by law or decree, the functions of which are specifically defined in terms of the promotion and protection of human rights. 7 Similarly, Mario Gomez has defined such bodies as state-sponsored and state-funded entities set up under an Act of Parliament or under the Constitution, with the broad objective of protecting and promoting human rights. 8 These more recent definitions specifically exclude from their purview institutions that possess a more general mandate (such as the regular courts, the legislature and the social welfare institutions of a state). 9 Yet, as functionally appealing as it now seems, this is a differentiation that was not always applied by the United Nations. 10 [End Page 663]
As defined by the United Nations, national human rights institutions are by no means a novel feature either of the human rights landscape or of the institutional terrain of most countries in the world. 11 From ombudspersons to national human rights commissions, the institutional terrain of virtually every country features at least one kind or the other of a national institution for the promotion and protection of human rights. 12 As well, the vastly increased worldwide attention that is now being paid to the development of such national institutions belies the relatively long (if hitherto unremarkable) history of their existence in various parts of the world. Indeed, the question of the necessity for the establishment of such institutions was discussed by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) as far back as 1946. 13 This matter was again discussed by ECOSOC in 1960. 14 As importantly, the first set of guidelines for the structure and functioning of national institutions was endorsed by the United Nations in the late 1970s. 15
Long as their history might be, it is correct nevertheless to perceive the 1990s and the period that has followed as the age of national human rights institutions. This age has witnessed the accordance by the United Nations of priority to this aspect of the struggle for human rights. 16 This age has also witnessed the exponential and exuberant proliferation of national institutions the world over. 17 Receiving impetus from the 1991 Paris International Workshop on National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, and the conclusions of that conference (now known as the Paris Principles), 18 the work of the United Nations in encouraging the establishment by each state of its own national institution...