Women Enabled International accountABILITY Toolkit: African Regional Human Rights System – Legal Standards on the Rights of Women and Girls with Disabilities

The accountABILITY Toolkit on the African Regional Human Rights System is dedicated to the millions of women and girls with disabilities in Africa and around the world who routinely encounter multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. This Toolkit is a call to action, urging and empowering us to collectively raise our voices to demand that international and regional human rights standards protect the rights of all women and girls, including those with disabilities.

As discussed in accountABILITY: African Regional Human Rights System Advocacy Guide, the African human rights bodies consist of independent human rights experts whose job is to (1) monitor whether States are meeting their legal obligations under relevant African human rights treaties, (2) interpret the meaning and concepts of the corresponding human rights treaties through development of documents such as General Comments and Concluding Observations, and (3) in some instances, make decisions on Individual Complaints submitted to them concerning the interpretation and application of the human rights treaties. Together, these documents make up the “jurisprudence” of the human rights bodies. By looking at this jurisprudence, together with the human rights treaties, we can better understand what types of actions violate African human rights law and what governments must do to meet their regional legal obligations.