67. The Court recalls that the concept of “settlement” implies the convergence
of three major conditions: (i) the identity of the parties; (ii) the identity of the
applications or their supplementary, consecutive or alternative nature or
whether the case flows from a request made in the initial case and (iii) the
existence of a first decision on the merits.14
68. The Court observes that the Respondent State contends that the alleged
violations in the present case have already been settled by the Court in the
matter of Anaclet Paulo v. Tanzania. The Court must, therefore, decide
whether its decision in the aforementioned case settles the issues raised in
the present Application.
69. On the “identity of the parties”, the Court notes that the Respondent State
is the same in both the Anaclet Paulo case and the present case. The
Applicant in the Paulo case was a convict of armed robbery serving a
sentence of thirty (30) years who sought to protect individual rights allegedly
violated in his trial before the national courts. On the other hand, the
Applicants in the instant case are NGOs seeking to protect the rights of the
public at large, arising from a public interest case before the national courts.
The Court therefore finds that the requirement of identity of the parties is not
met.
70. Having said that, the Court recalls that, as it has held in the past, when
determining whether an Application was previously settled, the Applicants
need not always be exactly the same, as long as they are pursuing the same
interest. In this regard, the Court observes that the Applicants in the
instance case are clearly pursuing different interests than in the Paulo case
but the convergence of their interests is only on Section 148(5)(a) of the
CPA. Therefore, the identity of the parties in the two Applications are similar
only to the extent that they both refer to Section 148(5)(a) of the CPA.
See Jean-Claude Roger Gombert v. Côte d’Ivoire (jurisdiction and admissibility) (22 March 2018) 2
AfCLR 270, § 44; Dexter Johnson v. Republic of Ghana (jurisdiction and admissibility) (28 March 2019)
3 AfCLR 99, § 45; See Suy Bi Gohore v. Côte d’Ivoire, (15 July 2020) (merits and reparations) 4 AfCLR
406, § 104.
14
17