Member states of the African Union (AU) will hold their most consequential election of the year in February 2026, to fill ten vacancies in continental human rights institutions. The elections are important because the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child are institutions that exist primarily to ensure that the continent’s governments take African lives seriously. 

Ikechukwu Uzoma, Senior Staff Attorney at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Center for Human Rights, writes with Tufts Professor Chidi Anselm Odinkalu on the potential for change the elections hold. The institutions could address environmental degradation, livelihoods, and forced displacement. 

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