Banjul, The Gambia. 26^th to 28^th June 2006

Open Society Institute’s Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP), Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and IHRDA organised a three day workshop prior to the July 2006 African Union Summit in Banjul, The Gambia, to provide an opportunity for African stakeholders involved in monitoring governments’ compliance with commitments made under AU treaties and other instruments to share information and lessons learned. The workshop brought together African civil society representatives from 19 countries, from organisations involved with the Africa Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), those carrying out independent assessments of compliance and OSJI’s multi-country Africa Citizenship Audit.

Topics covered

• Protecting political participation through equal rights to citizenship;
• APRM as a tool for monitoring government performance and compliance;
• Opportunities and barriers to civil society interaction with the APRM;
• Introducing the APRM, its structures, objectives, the process, and progress of individual countries;
• Brief summary of the civil society APRM workshop held in Addis Ababa in January 2006;
• APRM as a tool for assessing compliance with the Declaration on Democracy, Political, Economic and Corporate Governance;
• Civil society participation in the APRM;
• Recommendations to strengthening civil society interaction with the APRM;
• Domestic law and compliance with international treaties;
• Access to and availability of public information (government strategies, policies, and budget allocations);
• Marginalisation and political participation;
• Marginalisation of specific groups and its resulting political disenfranchisement;
• Exclusion: differentiation of citizenship on the basis of ethnicity;
• Legal and political strategies for overcoming marginalisation and discrimination.

workshop report ___.eng