The African Human Rights Case Law Analyzer as an Essential Tool for Litigants and Advocates of Pre-

trial Detention and Mental Health

The African Regional Workshop on Prison Health and Management of Special Needs Offenders

10th – 13th June 2013Dakar – Senegal

What is The African Human Rights Case law Analyser?

• The African Human Rights Case law Analyser (CLA) is an online database which contains a collection of jurisprudence and instruments of the African Human Rights system.

• It is a joint project of the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) and Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS).

Functionalities of the CLA• it highlights primary case law so the uninitiated user easily finds

relevant information;• automatically computes jurisprudential rank of each decision by

calculating the number of citations; • it provides easy browsing experience; • it allows the researcher to simultaneously read a decision and the

text of all law and case law authorities cited in it by loading all these texts within the same reading pane. We call this unique feature “inline loading”;

• it allows researchers to save their research by singing-up and maintaining their own private account, just like on Yahoo or Gmail. Through this personal account, researchers can bookmark interesting decisions and paragraphs, and annotate them with either private of public comments.

Features of the CLA

• The CLA contains human rights related decisions from six supra-national human rights complaints-handling bodies in Africa, namely: the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR), the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC), the SADC Tribunal, the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (ECOWAS CCJ).