Abdulmalik Bello, Legal Officer, IHRDA

1. Introduction 

Litigating before the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS Court) requires filing pleadings^[1] (also known as processes), as with every other court. Pleadings include a complaint in the form of an Originating Application,^[2] Statement of Defense,^[3] and supplementing Reply and Rejoinder.^[4]These shall be regarded as principal processes. Other interlocutory processes that may be filed during the pendency of a case include an application for extension of time, expedited procedure,^[5] interim measures, and default judgment, among others. To promote efficient case management and the expeditious determination of cases, the ECOWAS Court, by virtue of its Rules and Practice Directions, has set both time and page limits for processes filed in matters before it. While time limits generally govern the filing of principal processes, page limits apply more broadly to virtually all forms of applications and written submissions presented to the Court. 

The ECOWAS Court’s rules concerning page limits gradually evolved from inexistence in the 2002 Rules of Court, to their adoption with great flexibility and exceptions in the 2012 Instructions to the Chief Registrar and Practice Directions (2012 Practice Directions), to their strict application without express provision for exceptions in the 2025 Instructions to the Chief Registrar and Practice Directions (2025 Practice Directions). While the strict application of page limitation is aimed at ensuring expeditious case management,^[6] the removal of the clause previously under the 2012 Practice Directions allowing for exceptions in particularly complex and deserving cases raises concerns about the right of parties to be heard. This legal brief primarily examines this issue from an access to justice and progressive development of jurisprudence perspectives, with a view to making a case for the reintroduction of the exception clause.

2. The ECOWAS Court Page Limitation Rules

The page limitation rules appear to be central to the issuance of the 2025 Practice Direction, as it was addressed in its first provision. Article 1 stipulates that, “[n]otwithstanding the provisions of Article 9(2) and 10 of the Instructions to the Chief Registrar and Practice Directions of 2012,…(a) The Initiating Application and Statement of Defense shall not exceed 15 pages; (b) The Reply and the Rejoinder shall not exceed 10 pages; [and] (c)All other applications shall not exceed 5 pages”. For ease of reference, these requirements will henceforth be referred to as the 15-10-5 page limits rule. There is no further provision on how to calculate the prescribed page limits. As such, the front page of such applications, usually carrying the Court’s name, suit number, parties, and substantive and procedural provisions pursuant to which an application is brought before the Court and the last page usually made up of the date, legal representatives signature, names, addresses, contact details and the Respondent States’s address for service are computed as part of the 15-10-5 page limits rule. These are compulsory preliminary requirements that should not ordinarily be computed. Most importantly, neither the provision of Article 1 nor any subsequent provision states any exceptional circumstances where the Court may, in deserving cases, allow parties to exceed the set limits in the interest of justice. To strengthen Article 1, Article 3 provides that any application or other process that does not conform to this rule and the format requirements in Article 2 shall not be registered. The question is, can the Court grant leave to parties to a suit to exceed the set page limits even though such discretionary power is not expressly provided for under Article 1? 

Recalling that the opening clause of Article 1 provides that “[n]otwithstanding the provisions of Article 9(2) and 10” of the 2012 Practice Directions, it is necessary to examine those provisions to understand the implications of Article 1. Article 9(2) of the 2012 Practice Direction relates to principal processes and provides that “[t]he application must not exceed 15 pages, A4 paper, font size 12 or higher, except in exceptional circumstances related to the nature or the complexity of the case”. Article 10 concerns an application for expedited procedure and provides that “…[s]uch an application, save in exceptional circumstances, must not exceed 5 pages, A4 paper, font size 12 or higher…”. The important point to note is that even though both provisions impose page limitations on originating applications and applications for expedited procedure, respectively, they nonetheless allow for a measure of flexibility by permitting exceptions and judicial discretion in circumstances where the nature and complexity of a case justify a more extensive presentation of facts and legal arguments. It is specifically these provisions for exceptions in the application of the page limits rule that have been removed from Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions. Accordingly, a further question is whether the silence of Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions on permissible exceptions should be construed as removing all exceptions to the prescribed page limits and formatting requirements, and what implications this may have for access to justice. 

It is my firm submission that Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Direction should not be read as a complete removal of exceptions to the page limit requirements, as the Court may generally exercise its inherent powers to ensure substantive justice. Consequently, the absence of an express exception in the 2025 Practice Directions does not ordinarily imply that the Court lacks an inherent judicial power to waive or modify the requirement in deserving cases. However, this position may be validly contended in the face of the preceding clause in Article 1 (“Notwithstanding the provisions of Article 9(2) and 10”), which on its face seeks to take precedence over articles 9(2) and 10 of the 2012 Practice Directions, given that what sets the provisions of Article 9(2) and 10 of the 2012 Practice Directions apart from Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions is the express permission of exception in deserving cases. By employing the term “notwithstanding,” Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions suggests that it effectively displaces the application and operation of Articles 9(2) and 10 of the 2012 Practice Directions, and that may be legitimately interpreted as erasing the discretion previously available to accommodate cases requiring lengthier submissions. At the very least, Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions represents a shift from flexibility to rigidity in the Court’s approach to its page limitation rules. 

However, such conclusions would have serious consequences for access to justice and the progressive development of the law, which are briefly addressed in the following section.

3. The Practical Implication of Article 1: An access to justice and progressive jurisprudence perspective 

It must be admitted that lawyers litigating before courts could sometimes be unnecessarily and avoidably wordy, argumentative, and verbose. It must also be recognized, in all fairness, that the ECOWAS Court is burdened by a substantial volume of complaints given its expansive mandate. As a single regional court with jurisdiction extending well beyond human rights matters to encompass a broad range of community law disputes, it is tasked with adjudicating cases originating from and against all ECOWAS Member States. This extensive mandate, combined with its limited institutional and human resources,^[7] underscores the legitimate need for measures aimed at ensuring efficient case management and the expeditious administration of justice. These circumstances, coupled with the absence of an exhaustion of local remedies admissibility requirement,^[8] which at times places the Court in the position of a court of first instance, explain the inevitably high volumes of incoming complaints, relatively slower disposal rates, and case backlogs, among other pressing challenges confronting the Court. The quest to ensure the effective management of the Court’s caseloads necessitated the adoption of the page limits rules, among other important measures targeted at ensuring ‘a more efficient and effective management of cases and the conduct of proceedings before the Court’.^[9] This is quite understandable.

However, from an access to justice perspective, such measures must be carefully balanced against the need to ensure that parties are afforded a fair opportunity to adequately present complex cases before the Court in line with the right of every party to fair hearing, which the Court primarily stands to protect and defend. Every case deserves to be treated according to its own merit. Human rights lawyers are sometimes faced with cases involving dozens of applicants,^[10] with each applicant having different experiences emanating from the same subject matter, resulting in almost similar heads of violations, legal arguments, and yet requiring partly different reliefs, which would necessitate a comprehensive canvassing of the factual circumstances of each of the applicants to justify the need for differentiated reliefs. Additionally, some cases involve events and serious and systemic violations that span years. Such situations would necessarily result in lengthy statements of facts and legal arguments. Even the mere identification of litigants’ names on the face of an application in some cases may take over a page, in view of the technical requirement of font size, type, and paper size in terms of Article 2.  Further, some cases involve several heads of violations that require extensive legal arguments. Other cases involve a stack of documentary and electronic evidence that must be carefully woven into relevant facts and legal arguments. These are in addition to dealing with the requirement to comply with various procedural formalities, including the need to address issues of jurisdiction, admissibility, and standing, where applicable, before proceeding to the merits of the case. 

Insisting on the strict application of the page limitation rules in the foregoing scenarios and other cases whose nature and circumstances inevitably demand an extensive statement of facts and legal argument may pit the Court’s procedural rules directly against the spirit of fair hearing. The rule may affect the quality and comprehensiveness of legal submissions in complex cases before the ECOWAS Court. Unlike the communications procedure before the African Commission, where seizure, admissibility and the merits are considered separately, thereby allowing parties to make submissions on these issues at different stages of the proceedings, the ECOWAS Court requires applicants to present, in a single Originating Application, all issues relating to jurisdiction, admissibility, the subject matter of the proceedings, the statement of facts, legal arguments, and prayers for relief, all within the prescribed 15-page limit. Lawyers are often, therefore, compelled, even in not-so-complex cases, to strike a difficult balance between complying with the Court’s page limitations and presenting sufficiently detailed facts and legal arguments necessary to advance their claims before the Court. In the process, material facts, important arguments, and relevant authorities may be omitted or insufficiently developed. This, in turn, increases the risk of the Court being placed in a position where it must fill gaps in the parties’ submissions to reach a reasoned determination. 

Another equally important lens for exploring the ECOWAS Court page limitation rules is from a progressive jurisprudence perspective. Laws evolve through progressive judicial interpretation, and lawyers are pivotal to that process. They advance legal arguments that test the boundaries of existing laws, thereby enabling courts to determine, clarify, and progressively develop the law. The ECOWAS Court has an interpretative mandate and a human rights jurisdiction under Article 9 of the 2005 Supplementary Protocol, and the authority to apply relevant international legal instruments under Article 19 of the 1991 Protocol (A/P.1/7/91). These provisions, now respectively consolidated under articles 9 and 20 of the 2025 Supplementary Act SA.1/12/25, collectively provide a strong normative basis for the progressive evolution of its jurisprudence. In the face of current and emerging areas of law that raise significant human rights concerns including digital rights and cyber law, climate change and environmental justice, and business and human rights, lawyers and especially non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) engage in serious strategic litigation before the ECOWAS Court and other African regional human rights mechanisms, not only for individual reliefs and social, legal and policy reforms but also intentionally to fill in existing legal gaps. They pose novel questions and canvass innovative legal arguments that allow the Court and other mechanisms to clarify grey areas and progressively develop their jurisprudence. This is crucial not only for purposes of judicial precedent but also for human rights standards that constitute persuasive authorities for domestic, and other regional and international human rights judicial and quasi-judicial mechanisms. 

The point is that in such circumstances, considerable space is required to advance legal submissions enough to convince the Court, making such a case deserving of consideration for an exception. Maintaining a rigid page limit regime not only makes this difficult but takes away the joy and fulfilment that comes with engaging in such a process as a lawyer or NGO. That also places an additional burden on the Court, as such issues are only briefly discussed and hinted at by lawyers or NGOs within the available page limits, and the Court is left to figure out the legal question(s) to suo motu ask, argue, and decide. Such hints might sometimes be missed by the Court as well, as judges are not expected to accurately read the minds of lawyers or NGOs where they fail to fully table their case through convincing legal submissions. Hence, there is a need to expressly retain the judicial discretion to grant an exception to the page limit rule in deserving cases. 

Imposing page limits on judicial processes is not at all peculiar to the ECOWAS Court, and that is not the point of concern in this discussion. Some international and regional judicial bodies, like the International Criminal Court (ICC),^[11] the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR),^[12] and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU),^[13] also regulate page limits. Zooming in on the ICC, for instance, Regulation 37 of the Court’s 2004 Regulation (as amended in 2007) flatly imposes a 20-page limit on all documents filed with the Court’s Registry. The same provision allows the Chamber to extend the page limits in exceptional circumstances, at the request of a participant. In addition, Regulation 38 goes further to assign different page limits to specific documents outlined thereunder. Meanwhile, Regulation 36 already provides for how to calculate page limits, clarifying what may be counted and what may not in calculating page limits. While the robust and comprehensive nature of the ICC’s regime on page length regulation provides worthy guidance, the important point to highlight, for the purpose of this discussion, is the need for explicit exceptions to be justified on a case-by-case basis to achieve substantive justice. The prevailing practice among international and regional courts that adopt the page limits regime is to expressly allow judicial discretion in exceptional circumstances. Such an approach is obtainable in the ECtHR,^[14] CJEU,^[15] and some international and regional mechanisms that regulate page limits. This is good practice, which guides the ECOWAS Court away from a strict interpretation of Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions, which would prohibit exceptions even in deserving cases. This would result in undesirable consequences for victims of human rights violations who may need more space to comprehensively canvas their case before the Court.  

4. Conclusion and Recommendations

The ECOWAS Court has been noticeably intentional in ensuring efficient and effective management of cases and the conduct of proceedings before it. Such efforts are commendable, and other African regional human rights mechanisms should adopt a similar approach in the spirit of fairness and justice to parties approaching them for remedies. The launch of the Court’s Electronic Case Management System (ECMS) in June 2026 represents another significant step in that direction, further demonstrating the Court’s unmistakable commitment to the pursuit of greater efficiency and simplified access to justice. In an era where cases before some of the African regional mechanisms spend over six (6) years pending determination,^[16] the ECOWAS Court, despite its caseloads, has distinguished itself as a pace-setter in ensuring swift determination of cases with a considerable two to three-year turnaround time.^[17]  Justice delayed is indeed justice denied, and accordingly, the African regional human rights mechanisms should do better to cut down procedural delays, as the hope of human rights victims in the mechanisms as their final resort for justice should not fade away with concerns around delay in the determination of complaints.   

That said, the ECOWAS Court must, however, ensure that it strikes a fair balance between procedural efficiency and the right of parties to be heard, especially in complex human rights cases. The 15-10-5 page limitation is already comparatively on the lower side and can pose challenges to litigants even in straightforward cases. Human rights cases involving multiple victims, systemic violations, or complicated legal questions may not realistically fit within such limits. The total exclusion of judicial discretion in granting exceptions to the recommended page limits in deserving cases may therefore constitute a procedural barrier to the enjoyment of parties’ right to fair hearing. Such a rigid regime has also affected the ability of lawyers to properly argue new legal and progressive ideas with a view to developing the jurisprudence of the Court, especially in cases touching on emerging areas of law. 

It is therefore recommended that the Court reconsider its tough stance on its page limitation rules and to reintroduce the exception clause in the 2012 Practice Directions that has been erased from the 2025 Practice Directions. It is also necessary to include a provision in the Rules and Practice Directions on how to calculate the set page limits. Such a provision should, in fairness, exclude the first and last pages, often carrying compulsory preliminary information of the Court and parties, from computation.  While looking forward to such consideration and amendment of the Rules and Practice Directions, litigants and their lawyers should not be hindered by Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Directions from approaching the ECOWAS Court, in terms of its inherent powers, with applications for leave to exceed such page limits, in complex cases deserving extensive submissions. It is only by such applications that the true intent of the Court concerning that rule might be clarified, while also granting the Court the opportunity to appreciate the practical implications of its stance, should it intend to totally exclude exceptions to its page limitation rules. 

About the author:
Abdulmalik Bello is a Legal Officer at the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA). He holds an MSc in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford and an LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa from the University of Pretoria. He has extensive experience in strategic litigation before regional human rights mechanisms.

^[1] Article 32 of the 2002 Rules of the ECOWAS Court 

^[2] Article 33

^[3] Article 35

^[4] Article 36

^[5] Article 59 

^[6] Article 1 of the 2025 Practice Direction 

^[7] Addadzi-Koom MEA ‘Adjudicating Human Rights in the Ecowas Court: Challenges and Prospects’ (2023) Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, 5.

^[8] See article 10(4) of the Supplementary Act SA.1/12/25

^[9] Preamble, 2025 Practice Direction; Introduction, 2012 Practice Directions. 

^[10] IHRDA had recently submitted a complaint before the ECOWAS Court with over 40 Applicants.

^[11] See the 2004 Regulations of the ICC (as amended in 2007), Regulation 37.

^[12] See the 2025 Rules of Court of the ECHR, Rule 47(2)(b).

^[13] See the 2024 Practice Directions to Parties Concerning Cases brought before the Court, para. 18.

^[14] Where applicants fail to comply with the rules before the Court, they are allowed to provide satisfactory explanation to that effect. See 2025 Rules of Court of the ECHR, Rule 47, para 5.1. 

^[15] Para 18 of the2024 Practice Directions of the CJEU provides “Unless there are special circumstances, the application should not exceed 30 pages.

^[16] Two recent examples of such cases from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, respectively include Communication 686/18 – AWLDHR, IHRDA & Equality Now v. Congo – submitted before the African Commission in 2018 and decision published in 2025; and Application No: 019/2018, Centre for Human Rights, Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) and Legal and Human Rights Centre v. Tanzania- case submitted in 2018 but decided in 2025

^[17] This is based on our experience at IHRDA with the human rights cases we have filed before the ECOWAS Court