Page 47 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

Foreword
Introductory Messages
DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE
Human Rights and Dignity
Commissions of inquiry as accountability mechanisms
PEOPLE AND CONTEXTS
HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
PLANET AND SUSTAINABILITY
Awards
Lead Researchers
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Christof Heyns and Thomas Probert, Centre for Human Rights
Field work in six African countries examines the circumstances under which national commissions of inquiry can play a helpful role within accountability processes aimed at investigating violations of the right to life.
As part of a University-wide collaboration, the Faculty
of Law has for the past three years been investigating the role that national commissions of inquiry can play
as accountability mechanisms for violations of the right to life. This was part of a broader research project, supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, examining how traditional African moral resources, such as Ubuntu, continue to shape contemporary governance.
The project was led by Christof Heyns, Professor
of Human Rights Law, and Dr Thomas Probert, Extraordinary Lecturer in the Centre for Human Rights. They were joined by Meetali Jain and Anyango Yvonne Oyieke from the Law Faculty, as well as by several researchers from the Faculty of Humanities and from a local NGO. The research project was designed to reinforce the work of revising the UN’s main resource on investigating suspicious deaths, the Minnesota Protocol.
The researchers selected six individual case studies of national commissions of inquiry: in Chad, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Nigeria. In each case,
a lead researcher travelled to the country in question, sometimes joined by another from the team at UP, or by a local research assistant, and conducted interviews with key participants. These included some of the commissioners themselves, evidence-leaders or other key lawyers around the work of the commission, those working for prominent NGOs working with the legacy of the commission, representatives of Ministries of Justice, and others.
The objective was to establish to what extent the commission of inquiry was able to function as an
effective investigation of what happened, and also the extent to which it has contributed to other elements of human rights accountability, namely remedy for victims and reform of structural issues. Underlying this was a question about whether commissions might in some circumstances conduct the investigation in a manner more compatible with traditional approaches toward justice, being more participatory, less binary and more holistic in its approach to the question of the right to life than would be the case in straightforward police investigations.
In several of the cases examined, commissions of inquiry appear to have contributed to accountability in ways that were not foreseen by those who established them. The ad hoc character of a commission often allows discretion of action to its members, and in several instances proactive commissioners, or civil society organisations working around a commission, have driven forward accountability, in novel ways. The findings have been collated in a book to be published by the Pretoria University Law Press in 2018.
Thomas Probert