The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and Collective Peoples’ Rights: Original Contributions from Nigeria’s Practice

This doctoral research generates original theoretical and doctrinal contributions to the interpretation of collective peoples' rights under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), using Nigeria's extensive and contested practice regarding the right to self-determination, the right to development, the right to a satisfactory environment, and the right to natural resources as primary empirical and doctrinal material. The African Charter's innovation of peoples' rights as justiciable collective entitlements represents one of the most distinctive contributions of regional human rights law globally, yet interpretive scholarship on these rights remains underdeveloped relative to their normative significance. The research employs an original theoretical-doctrinal methodology, combining systematic analysis of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights' jurisprudence on peoples' rights with deep analysis of three Nigerian peoples' rights controversies: Ogoni environmental rights claims, Southeast self-determination discourse, and the rights of farmer-herder communities to natural resource access. The theoretical framework constructs an original taxonomy of peoples' rights entitlements, distinguishing collective identity rights, collective resource rights, and collective governance rights, and developing a model for their adjudication that resolves current interpretive ambiguities. The research makes an original contribution to African regional human rights law by advancing a coherent jurisprudential framework for the African Commission and Court's adjudication of peoples' rights claims. Policy recommendations address the domestication of peoples' rights remedies in Nigerian law. Keywords: African Charter, peoples' rights, collective rights, self-determination, Nigeria.