The Arab Charter and the League of Arab States

In one line

The League of Arab States adopted an Arab Charter on Human Rights in 1994 which never entered into force, adopted a revised Charter in 2004 which entered into force in 2008, supervises it through a committee that receives State reports and cannot receive complaints, and adopted a statute for an Arab Court of Human Rights in 2014 which has not entered into force.

The organisation

The League of Arab States was founded in 1945, making it older than the Organization of American States as a regional body and much older than the African Union.

It is a political organisation of States, and its founding instrument is concerned with co-operation and with the sovereignty of members, not with the treatment of individuals.

A permanent Arab Commission on Human Rights was created in 1968, composed of government representatives, and its work was directed outward, principally at conditions in occupied territories, rather than at the members' own conduct.

That orientation is the background to everything that followed, because a body created to examine others is a poor foundation for a body that must examine its own.

The three instruments

The Arab Charter on Human Rights, 1994. Adopted by the Council of the League. It never entered into force, because no State ratified it. It attracted sustained criticism for falling below international standards.

The revised Arab Charter on Human Rights, 2004. Adopted at the Tunis summit in May 2004, and entered into force in 2008 on the seventh ratification.

The Statute of the Arab Court of Human Rights, 2014. Adopted by the Council of the League. It has not entered into force.

The Court statute drew criticism at adoption on a structural ground that can be stated without reading it: reports indicated that access would be confined to States Parties, with any individual or non-governmental access dependent on a further optional acceptance by the respondent State. That is the African article 34(6) problem in a stronger form, and it is why the instrument was described as creating a court that would hear almost nothing.

The supervisory body

The revised Charter establishes an Arab Human Rights Committee, sometimes called the Arab Human Rights Commission, composed of independent experts elected by the States Parties.

Its function is to receive and examine periodic State reports and to issue comments and recommendations, which are transmitted to the Council of the League.

What it does not have is the point. There is no individual communications procedure, no inter-State complaints procedure, and no power to make a finding of violation in a case. Reporting is the whole of the machinery.

On the three-part test used throughout this module, the Arab system has an instrument, has a body, and has no procedure by which any person can complain of anything. It therefore fails the second variable of [The European System Assessed]: bindingness is absent because there is nothing to bind.