From host to opponent? Tanzania’s paradoxical relationship with the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights

Ms Liese Dewulf

Liese recently completed her Master of Laws at Ghent University. Her academic interests lie particularly in international human rights law and the intersection of law and technology. As part of her studies, she participated in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition and examined the recent wave of state withdrawals from the direct jurisdiction of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in her master’s thesis.

Introduction

While the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR, or the Court) is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, new premises are being built in Arusha, Tanzania, to house it. At first glance, this may look like a gesture of hospitality, namely a state further investing in the institution it has hosted and welcomed since 2007. And yet this is the same Tanzania that, in 2019, withdrew the Declaration under the Protocol on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Court Protocol), allowing its own citizens and NGOs to bring cases directly before that very Court. The government that builds the Court’s home is thus also one of the governments that closed its door to its own people (Daly and Wiebusch, 2018; Faix and Jamali, 2022; Mussi and Pascale, 2022).

Tanzania’s withdrawal was only the second in what has since become a sustained wave: starting with Rwanda’s withdrawal in 2016, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire followed Tanzania’s withdrawal in 2020, and lastly we witnessed Tunisia’s withdrawal in March 2025. That same year, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso jointly withdrew from the International Criminal Court and, separately, from the founding treaty of the ECOWAS Court of Justice; a reminder that resistance to international judicial oversight is very much a live and evolving phenomenon on the continent (Daly and Wiebusch, 2018; Faix and Jamali, 2022; Mussi and Pascale, 2022). Tanzania’s case deserves particular attention precisely because it is the Court’s host state.

This post traces how Tanzania’s relationship with the Court evolved from cooperation to contestation and argues that the label of backlash, while not wrong, risks flattening a far more nuanced reality. The analysis draws not only on existing scholarship and case law but also on interviews conducted in September 2025 with a senior researcher, Dr Edward Murimi, the executive director of an African NGO, and a former judge of the African Court, both of whom wished to remain anonymous.

A system with two doors

When Tanzania ratified the Court’s founding Protocol (the Court Protocol) in 2006 and agreed, a year later, to host it in Arusha, it was signing up to a system built in 1998, within the framework of the African Union (AU), to safeguard human rights across the continent. The Court’s authority rests on its power to interpret the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR or the Charter) and related legal instruments, and it gives individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) a judicial forum to hold states accountable for human rights violations, but only if those states have accepted the Article 34(6) Declaration (Wiebusch, 2021).

That Declaration is what makes this a system of two doors. Together with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Commission), the Court forms a hybrid, dual structure: for individuals and NGOs, there is indirect access via the Commission, and direct access wherever a state has opened the second door by making the Declaration under Article 34(6) of the Court Protocol (Wiebusch, 2021). Tanzania opened that second door in 2010. Nine years later, it shut it again; joining Rwanda, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Tunisia in a wider wave of withdrawals that is now raising serious concerns about the Court’s future (Daly and Wiebusch, 2018; Faix and Jamali, 2022; Mussi and Pascale, 2022).

Two judgments, two sources of tension

Scholars specifically highlight the Mtikila v Tanzania and Ally Rajabu v Tanzania cases before the Court as cases that contributed to Tanzania’s decision to withdraw (Adjolohoun, 2020; Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023).

The first is Tanganyika Law Society, Legal and Human Rights Centre and Reverend Christopher R Mtikila v Tanzania (2013). Reverend Mtikila had spent years challenging Tanzanian laws that barred independent candidates from standing in elections, requiring every candidate to be sponsored by a registered political party. Tanzania’s own Court of Appeal had dismissed the matter as ‘political’ and best left to Parliament. The African Court disagreed, ruling that the ban violated the right to political participation, freedom of association, and the principle of non-discrimination under Articles 2, 3 and 10 of the Charter, and ordering Tanzania to bring its electoral laws into line with the Charter. Tanzania’s initial response was one of open resistance: rather than implementing the ruling, it appeared to attempt to re-litigate the issues, delaying any meaningful legislative change (Windridge, 2015).

The second is Ally Rajabu and Others v Tanzania (2019), concerning five men sentenced to death by mandatory hanging for murder. The Court found that the mandatory nature of the death penalty, which left no room to consider mitigating circumstances, violated the right to life under Article 4 of the Charter, and that execution by hanging was inherently degrading under Article 5 of the Charter. It ordered Tanzania to amend its Penal Code and grant judges discretion in death penalty cases. The reaction from Tanzanian authorities was telling: shortly after the judgment, the Attorney General publicly stated that domestic law and the Constitution stood above international judgments; a direct signal of intent to disregard the Court’s ruling (Amnesty International, 2019). Years later, Tanzania still had not implemented the decision and continued to hand down death sentences regardless.

Sovereignty as narrative, overload and democratic backsliding as reality

On the 14^th of November 2019, only a few days before the Ally Rajabu judgment, Tanzania’s minister of foreign affairs signed a notice of withdrawal of the Declaration (Adjolohoun, 2020; Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023). This timing led scholars like Adjolohoun and Mtavangu to believe that this sensitive judgment of socio-political relevance may have significantly contributed to Tanzania’s decision to withdraw. In its notice of withdrawal, however, the government cited a specific reason for its withdrawal (United Republic of Tanzania, 2019). It stated that the Declaration has been implemented contrary to Tanzania’s reservations when it made the Declaration. These reservations only allowed direct access to the Court by individuals and NGOs after exhausting domestic remedies and in accordance with the Tanzanian Constitution. From Tanzania’s perspective, the African Court had exceeded the limits of these reservations by allowing cases that, in its view, bypassed domestic judicial authority and challenged constitutional arrangements, as shown in the Ally Rajabu and Mtikila case. Tanzania thus portrayed its withdrawal as a reaction to jurisdictional overreach and an infringement on its sovereignty rather than political dissatisfaction.

Yet, as Adjolohoun demonstrates, these reservations were both legally weak and functioned primarily as a rhetorical cover for deeper tensions (Adjolohoun, 2020). The reservations were legally weak as the exhaustion requirement itself was redundant. The same rule already existed under the African Charter itself, while the constitutional reservation effectively subordinated the Court’s jurisdiction to Tanzania’s own Constitution, emptying the Declaration of its very purpose: allowing individuals to challenge national law, including constitutional provisions, against international human rights norms.

Moreover, the reservations do not seem to be the true cause of the withdrawal. Instead, they function as a cover for deeper tensions with two structural factors that seem to have played a decisive role, namely the overwhelming caseload on the one hand and the resulting litigation fatigue on the other (Adjolohoun, 2020; Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023; Faix and Jamali, 2022). By the time of the withdrawal, Tanzania was the respondent in 138 of the Court’s 255 cases and was expected to implement more than 60 remedial orders, making withdrawal, in practice, the only realistic way to escape a so-called unsustainable legal and political burden (Adjolohoun, 2020; Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023).

That caseload also intersected with a broader pattern of democratic backsliding (Adjolohoun, 2020; Faix and Jamali, 2022). Many of the Court’s most important Tanzanian cases directly targeted core features of the domestic political and judicial system, including the Ally Rajabu and Mtikila cases. From the perspective of a government that was tightening political control and asserting sovereignty, this amounted to a direct challenge to regime stability and legal authority (Adjolohoun, 2020; Faix and Jamali, 2022, Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023). The Court was no longer merely correcting individual human rights violations but was reshaping Tanzania’s constitutional and criminal justice landscape (Adjolohoun, 2020; Faix and Jamali, 2022, Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023). In such a political climate, continued acceptance of individual access to an international court thus carried high domestic costs.

Tanzania’s changing relationship with the Court

Initially, Tanzania maintained a largely positive and cooperative relationship with the African Court (Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023). This was reflected most clearly in its decision to host the Court in Arusha and to submit the Declaration under Article 34(6). Tanzania’s institutional engagement with the Court was also significant, not least because the Court’s previous President was Tanzanian, further symbolising a close and constructive relationship between the host state and the institution.

Over time, however, this relationship became more tense. According to Adjolohoun, the withdrawal did not come as a surprise but rather as a foreseen reaction (Adjolohoun, 2020). Even before the withdrawal, Tanzania had repeatedly contested the Court’s jurisdiction and procedure, including through requests for extensions of time, reflecting growing frustration with its expanding litigation burden. The exceptionally high number of cases brought against Tanzania, combined with the state’s sensitive domestic political context, gradually transformed cooperation into contestation and ultimately led to the withdrawal of the Declaration (Mtavangu and Mbilinyi, 2023). Both the interviewed executive director of the NGO and Edward Murimi pointed out that this heavy caseload is not at all surprising (executive director NGO; and Edward Murimi, personal communications, September 2025). Because the seat of the Court is located in Tanzania, access is physically and procedurally easier for Tanzanian litigants than for individuals and NGOs based elsewhere on the continent, which may partly explain why Tanzania became the most frequently litigated state before the Court.

Importantly, however, this withdrawal should not be interpreted as a complete rejection of the African Court. The interviewees emphasised that Tanzania has continued to demonstrate a degree of goodwill towards the Court (executive director and Edward Murimi and former judge, personal communications, September 2025). If the government intended to express outright hostility, it could have gone much further than withdrawing, for instance, by terminating the hosting agreement and evicting the Court from Arusha. Instead, not only has Tanzania allowed the Court to remain, but it has also started building new premises for the Court, according to the NGO’s executive director (executive director, personal communication, September 2025). Moreover, both the interviewed executive director and former judge of the Court referred to ongoing discussions about the possibility that Tanzania may reconsider and resubmit the Declaration in the future (executive director and former judge, personal communications, September 2025). Although the current political context makes such a move unlikely in the short term, the decision not to evict the Court and to continue investing in its infrastructure indicates a more nuanced and cooperative stance than one of pure and simple backlash.

Tanzania’s position is therefore quite exceptional: a state that hosts the seat of an international court has shut the door that lets individuals and NGOs bring cases directly before it; a combination with no real comparator anywhere in international adjudication.

So while the withdrawal undoubtedly changed Tanzania’s relationship with the Court, it did not turn the host state into an outright opponent. What it did produce is a striking paradox: by continuing to host the Court, Tanzania projects a strong commitment to human rights and the rule of law at the international level; by withdrawing the Declaration, it has closed the most direct avenue for its own people to seek protection of those same rights. Tanzania’s role as host, in other words, coexists uneasily with a deliberate restriction of judicial oversight over its own conduct.

Conclusion

While Tanzania initially embraced the African Court by hosting it and granting direct access through the Article 34(6) Declaration, the growing number of politically sensitive cases combined with an increasingly restrictive domestic political environment gradually transformed this relationship into a source of tension. The Mtikila and Ally Rajabu cases illustrate how the Court’s interventions became perceived as challenges to core elements of Tanzania’s constitutional order and criminal justice system.

At the same time, Tanzania’s decision to withdraw did not amount to a complete rejection of the Court. By continuing to host the Court and investing in its infrastructure, Tanzania has preserved the symbolic and diplomatic benefits of its association with the African human rights system, even as it curtailed the most direct form of judicial oversight over its own conduct. Tanzania’s position as both host and resistor thus reflects a paradoxical but deliberate recalibration of engagement rather than a complete rupture with the African Court as an opponent.

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