Young Africans argue the case of human rights at AUC, reports Gamal Nkrumah At the opening ceremony of the 11th African Human Rights Moot Court, held at the American University in Cairo (AUC), there was no sign that the organisers were buckling under the pressure of the massive competition as it began on Wednesday, 7 August. AUC organised the competition in conjunction with the Human Rights Centre of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Dr John Gerhart, ninth president of AUC, flew in from the United States to specially welcome the participants. Gerhart stressed that human rights are universal in their application; but the participants in this competition were African -- the judges were African and the issues at stake were essentially African issues. The African Moot Court is an annual event that brings together law students and faculty from African universities to deliberate a hypothetical human rights case before benches of judges. These judges are academics, actual judges and experts on international human rights law. This year, over 60 teams from 30 African countries participated. There were 46 English-speaking teams, 17 francophone teams and two Portuguese-speaking teams from Mozambique. In terms of format the 11th Moot Court has made several new advances over the last. A one-day course entitled "The International Protection of Human Rights" was designed to reorient students and introduce the public to the legal aspects of human rights. This year, the course given in Arabic was open to Egyptian government officials and representatives of non- governmental organisations as well as academics. "Everything went so smoothly this year. Students from different countries spent time together, got to know each other better and learnt about each others' cultures," Dina Sherif, head organiser and an ex-mooter herself, told Al-Ahram Weekly. Sherif is currently a Cairo-based development consultant, but was a participant when still a student at AUC three years ago at the African Moot Court in Côte d'Ivoire. "At previous competitions students did not socialise with each other; it was difficult to connect," Sherif explained. "We arranged for at least two dinners where everyone could connect. People danced, and the atmosphere was less formal and strained," she added. So what accounted for the marked improvement in the Moot Court competition? "Cairo is an excellent conference venue, with lots of opportunities for sightseeing and students can be taken for excursions to internationally renowned tourist attractions such as the Pyramids," Sherif said. Egypt, she added, has relatively sophisticated facilities that help make such conferences successful. The facilities provided by the AUC, including the student hostels and the universities' commendable catering and conference facilities, were crucial to the success of the Cairo event. Sherif said the ability to use the premises of the Arab League, with its spacious conference halls, was of tremendous symbolic value. Indeed, the final round of the competition was held at the Arab League in the pulsating heart of Cairo. The joint winners of the competition were the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and the Université de la Réunion, from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. In another joint effort, the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and the Université Mohamed I came in second. The rules of the African Moot Court competition stipulate that a francophone team join together with an anglophone team and work together against a similar bilingual pairing. Simultaneous translation was provided to enable the teams to communicate more easily. The applicants, or plaintiffs, file the case against the respondents, or defendants -- in this case the government. By draw of lots, it was determined in advance which teams were to argue the case for the plaintiffs and which one argues the case of the respondent. This year, the plaintiff was an armed opposition group which brought a legal case against its government. KOOLIMO, an acronym which stands for the entirely fictitious but rather convincing Koo Liberation Movement, is ostensibly engaged in an armed struggle against the government of Kanu, again an imaginary African nation. The focus of the competition was the timely subject of children in armed struggle. Numerous African armed opposition groups conscript juveniles in a desperate bid to topple governments or secede. The winning team scored 1,980 points and the losers scored a perilously close 1,966 points. Regarding complaints about this year's judging, African Moot Court organiser Norman Taku said that every year there are some complaints regarding the scoring system. There are bad losers and it is natural that some students feel they have been judged unfairly. This year, Taku said, there were only three official complaints out of 64 participating teams. Judges are given guidelines on how to mark the teams. And, they sometimes give low marks for subjective reasons. As a rule, however, the standards are always very high. The nine judges for the finals in Cairo were a most distinguished lot. They included Egypt's Vice President of the State Council and Legal Presidential Adviser Dr Mostafa Said Hanafi and Nabil El-Arabi, an acclaimed Egyptian judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, The Netherlands. Among the judges for the finals were Professor Tiya Maluwa, the Malawian legal counselor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Justice Theolakele Madala, a judge of the South African Consitutional Court. The recently retired Dr David Padilla, who was assistant executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was also among the judges in the finals. Unlike the Philip Jessop International Moot Court Competition, an annual Washington competition and perhaps the world's biggest and most important Moot Court affair, the African Moot Court competition's teams are made up of students and their lecturers. "The Philip Jessop competition is open to students and independent human rights advisors only, but not lecturers," Norman Taku, of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, told the Weekly. Taku, one of the African event's chief organisers, said that the organisers of the African moot competition are looking into ways of improving the scoring system and they are examining the relevance of the Philip Jessop system. Is the African Moot Court competition a serious attempt at instilling a respect for human rights among Africa's future legal practitioners, or is it a thinly-veiled attempt at Americanising the continent's legal system? Hardly, according to the organisers and participants who thought the suggestion "laughable". Dr Mostafa El-Feki, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Relations at the People's Assembly, told the Weekly that the objective of the competition is to create a generation of Africans who are sensitive to human rights issues and can bring to task violators of human rights. The aim of the African Moot Court concept is to sensitise future legal practitioners in Africa to human rights issues. "It provides experience in formulating and presenting legal argument on human rights issues," El-Feki said. El-Fiki stressed that in the African context the concept of human rights cannot be restricted to individual freedoms but must embrace social rights, such as the right to equal opportunities and the right to be free from hunger, disease, illiteracy and ignorance. Mohamed Hilal, a participating AUC student, concurred. "We all know about human rights, but it is very difficult to legally argue a case concerning the violation of human rights before a court of law. It is difficult to pin down the violators," Hilal said. Hilal explained that he found the Moot Court a very valuable experience because he learnt how to legally argue human rights violation cases. "We drew on different sources of law. We learnt how to use different legal systems, primarily European and American, and to use the precedents in those systems in the African context or setting," he said. The respondent, the fictitious government of Kanu, won this year's African Moot Court. In this exercise, which allows Africa's future lawyers and advocates to exercise their skills in a realistic setting, judges do not make their decisions based on the merits of the case. Rather, the case is decided based on the advocacy skills of the participants therefore emphasising the skills that will benefit the next generation of Africans and their leaders.
