WAHAB EGBEWOLE SAN NATIONAL DISABILITY RIGHTS MOOT COMPETITION 2026

International human rights law concerning persons with disabilities evolved from a welfare-and-charity model toward a rights-based framework over the second half of the twentieth century. Early instruments such as the 1971 Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons and the 1975 Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons were aspirational and non-binding. The paradigm shifted decisively with the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006, which entered into force in 2008 and has been ratified by every ECOWAS member state. The CRPD reframes disability as a product of the interaction between impairments and societal barriers, imposing obligations of non-discrimination, reasonable accommodation, accessibility, legal capacity, and inclusive participation. At the regional level, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (1981) guarantees broad non-discrimination but does not expressly name disability. That gap was addressed by the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Africa, adopted by the African Union in 2018, although its entry into force has been delayed by slow ratification. The ECOWAS Court of Justice, since its 2005 Supplementary Protocol granted it human rights jurisdiction over individual complaints, has applied both the African Charter and universal treaties including the CRPD and the ICCPR, building a body of decisions on torture, slavery, education, and discrimination that increasingly engages disability questions. Today the central legal disputes concern how the Court should interpret and enforce CRPD standards against ECOWAS states, the relationship between domestic disability legislation and supranational obligations, remedies for systemic discrimination, and the justiciability of socio-economic rights such as inclusive education, accessible healthcare, and employment for persons with disabilities.

Regional justice in West Africa is anchored by the ECOWAS Court of Justice, established under the 1991 Protocol and substantially transformed by the 2005 Supplementary Protocol A/SP.1/01/05, which extended its jurisdiction to hear human rights complaints brought directly by individuals without a requirement to exhaust domestic remedies. This reform made the ECOWAS Court one of the most accessible international human rights tribunals in the world and produced landmark decisions including Koraou v. Niger (2008) on slavery, SERAP v. Nigeria (2010) on the right to education, and Dabo Bassene v. Senegal-style rulings on detention and due process. The Court complements the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights and the African Commission, though overlapping mandates and inconsistent state acceptance of optional protocols create fragmentation. Persistent challenges undermine the system's effectiveness. State compliance with ECOWAS Court judgments remains uneven; several governments have ignored adverse rulings, withdrawn cooperation, or, as Gambia did in 2009 and others have threatened, sought to curtail the Court's powers. The 2020 withdrawal of Tanzania's individual access declaration to the African Court signalled a broader regional backlash against supranational human rights adjudication, raising concerns about similar erosion within ECOWAS. The recent withdrawals of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from ECOWAS itself, formalized in 2024-2025, have created an unprecedented jurisdictional crisis over pending cases and the future reach of the Court. Current debates concern enforcement mechanisms for Court judgments, the harmonisation of ECOWAS jurisprudence with that of the African Court and the CRPD Committee, the use of regional litigation to advance disability rights, and how the Court can preserve its legitimacy and accessibility amid political contestation and institutional fragmentation.

Disability rights jurisprudence is a comparatively young but rapidly developing field. Globally, the entry into force of the CRPD in 2008 created the first binding treaty body, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, whose General Comments on legal capacity (No. 1), accessibility (No. 2), women with disabilities (No. 3), and inclusive education (No. 4) have reshaped how courts interpret non-discrimination. National constitutional courts in India, South Africa, Kenya, and Colombia have produced influential rulings on reasonable accommodation, supported decision-making, and inclusive education, while the European Court of Human Rights has read disability protections into the ECHR through cases such as Glor v. Switzerland and Çam v. Turkey. In Africa, jurisprudence has been more limited but is expanding. The African Commission has addressed disability obliquely in cases on mental health detention (e.g., Purohit and Moore v. The Gambia, 2003) and conditions of detention. The ECOWAS Court has begun engaging disability questions directly, including in decisions touching on inclusive education, the rights of persons with albinism, and access to justice. The 2018 African Disability Protocol, once in force, will provide an explicit regional standard on issues such as harmful practices, ritual killings of persons with disabilities, accessibility, and political participation. Domestic frameworks vary widely: Nigeria's 2018 Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities (Prohibition) Act, Ghana's 2006 Persons with Disability Act, and Sierra Leone's 2011 Persons with Disability Act all create rights but suffer from weak implementation and limited litigation. The current frontier concerns how courts should apply CRPD standards to contested issues: legal capacity and guardianship regimes, segregated versus inclusive education, deinstitutionalisation, reasonable accommodation in employment, accessibility of physical environments and digital services, and effective remedies for systemic discrimination. The ECOWAS Court is positioned to develop authoritative regional jurisprudence on these questions.