We are delighted to invite you to the second of our HRLC Research Conversations for this academic year, which will focus on the work of HRLC Visiting Scholar, Dr Ahmed Almutawa (Royal Academy of Police, Kingdom of Bahrain), who will be presenting the following paper: ‘The Arab Court of Human Rights, the right of direct individual petition, and lessons from the European Court of Human Rights’.
This event will take place on Thursday, 2 May from 15:00 to 16.00, online via Microsoft Teams. For those interested in attending, we ask that you please register.
Abstract: If Human rights are rendered meaningful by the ‘institutional and social structures that concretize and implement them’, then the proposed Arab Court of Human Rights should be welcomed as the institution needed to complete the Arab regional human rights system. In 2014, the League of Arab States attempted to rectify the lack of any enforcement mechanism for the Arab Charter of Human Rights 2004. However, the adopted Statute of the Arab Court of Human Rights was heavily criticised and condemned as not fit for purpose by the International Commission of Jurists. One of the most significant criticisms was the extremely limited provision for individual petition. This research presentation considers whether the Statute should be amended to follow the model of direct individual petition, which may be seen as the jewel in the crown of the European human rights system. Based on the experiences of the European Court of Human Rights, it will argue that, while a right of individual petition is hugely important, a right of direct individual petition should not be seen as the mechanism of choice of the Arab Court of Human Rights, and arguably for any regional human rights system.
Speaker Biography: Dr Ahmed Almutawa is a police officer and a member of academic staff at the Royal Academy of Police, Kingdom of Bahrain. In 2020, he was awarded a PhD from the University of Leeds for a thesis that examined the legitimacy of counterterrorist financing in Bahrain. Since then, he has worked on developing a research interest in international human rights law. Dr Almutawa has participated in several conferences and delivered seminars in Bahrain, the UK and overseas in the area of human rights law and counter terrorism. His work has been published in leading journals in the field, such as the Human Rights Law Review, Public Law, Journal of Human Rights Practice, and the European Human Rights Law Review, amongst others. In 2022, along with co-author Hajer Almanea, he was awarded the Kamran Arif Annual award for ‘best article of the year’ by the editors of the Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. The paper, which was published in the 2022 Yearbook (volume 6), examines the noncompliance of national legislation with the Arab Charter of Human Rights.