Human Rights our Collective Responsibility forward without a proper assessment of the problem it was intended to solve, but also that the proposal would still have resulted in a breach of Article 21(1) of the African Charter. This, the Complainants submitted or argued, is because they would have lost their right to their natural resources under Article 21 of the African Charter without the Respondent State providing a suitable alternative. 157. The Complainants also submitted in reply that the fact that the EEPCO alone will determine whether, when and for how long to release water from the Dam, if at all, blatantly violates the peoples' right to freely dispose of their natural resources. They submitted that but for the failure to o,qtain the free, prior and informed consent of the Complainants, the proposal for a system of controlled floods would have not violated the provision of Article 21 of the African Charter. 158. The Complainants submitted that contrary to the Respondent State'scontention that the vast majority of Omo pastoralists did not have a legal claim to land affect by the development projects, Article 21 of the African Charter is not contingent on land ownership. 159. In its further observations, the Complainants submitted that, contrary to the Respondent State's submission that Ethiopia has a supposedly decentralized and democratic system of political representation, they have not claimed any breach of the right of the Complainants as individuals to participate freely in the government of their country under Article 13 of the African Charter. Rather, the Complainants have confined their 'claim to breaches of their rights as peoples under Articles 20 to 24 of the African Charter. The co-existence of these rights in the African Charter reflects the principle that citizens are not expected to rely on their individual right to political representation to defend their collective rights as "peoples". Those collective rights merit and have been granted separate recognition. 160. The Complainants submitted that the Respondent State's submissions or arguments that it consulted members of the Bodi and Mursi communities in Hana City as well as in the villages on Kuraz do not sufficiently clarify whether the consultations took place before or after the Prime Minister's speech in January 2011 that the Kuraz project would start that year. )''\n Oig<:tn of the Atrican {(~"'~)'l Unlon'~iI 31