Dissenting Opinion by Commissioner Yasir Sid Ahmad El Hassan, Vice-Chairperson of the African Commission 1 1. This is a dissenting opinion from the one that was adopted by a simple majority of the members of the [African] Commission on communication 197/1997 during the 35th Ordinary Session of the African Commission held from 21st May to 4th June 2004. The present dissenting opinion is based on 2 facts and arguments derived from the original documents contained in the communication file. 2. Furthermore, most of the documents submitted by the parties to the communication were originally in Arabic and were never translated into English or French, the languages of the commissioner, who was the first rapporteur or the legal officer working on the file at the Secretariat of the [African] Commission. These documents contained the ruling of different local courts of the Respondent State. So the commissioners made a decision relying only on the short and inaccurate summary of file that was given to them. 3. The essence of facts of this communication as extracted from the file shows that it was a normal civil litigation between two members of the same family over a plot of land. The Complainant, a banker born in 1949, filed in 1986, a lawsuit in local courts in which he claimed the full title over this real estate. 4. The Complainant originally argued before courts that the disputed land belongs to his father, and 3 that his mother has no separate title to dispose of the land. The Respondent claimed that the mother of the Complainant has a separate property and transferred to himself and his sisters by the way of donation, this plot of land which constitutes part of her property. He further claimed that he was de facto in peaceful, continuous and uninterrupted possession of that land for 27 consecutive years before the claim of the Complainant, which was brought before the courts only in 1986. 5. A decision of the District Court of Boutilimitt, the Court of Rosso, dated 26/12/1988, a decision of the Court of Appeal of Nouakchott dated 11/3/1990, and a decision of the Supreme Court dated 5/11/1990, ruled all in favour of the Respondent on the grounds that the failure of the complainant to refute the strong evidence composes of antiquity of deeds and testimonies of reliable and credible witnesses as well as de facto possession of the disputed land. The final ruling from the Supreme Court was delivered on 5th [November] 1990. 6. On April 11th 1997, the Complainant filed this communication 197/1997 against the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. 7. The complainant claimed before the [African] [C]ommission that in November 1975, that is four years after the death of his mother, he himself and his family were forcefully expelled from their ancestral home by Mohamed Ould Bah (his opponent) on the grounds that the complainant’s mother, Aichetou Valle had been his slave and that, the house and the surrounding land therefore rightfully belonged to him. 8. The Complainant further claimed that the courts of his country, which are state institutions, deprived him from his property and since then he wrote to the highest governmental authorities including the President of the Republic, protesting against this blatant governmental support for the illegal institution of slavery, but has received no reply as of this date. 9. Article 56.6 of the African Charter requires that communication should be submitted within a reasonable period from the time when local remedies have been exhausted or from the date the [African] Commission is seized with the matter. 10. The Complainant resorted to local courts only in 1986 whereas he alleged that he had been forcefully expelled from his home in 1975. And again he took more than six years after the Supreme Court delivered its final decision to submit his communication to the [African] Commission in April 1997. In my view, this can be considered as unreasonable period in term of Article 56.6 of the African Charter, and accordingly the [African] Commission ought to declare this communication inadmissible. 11. From the documents in the file, which contains the rulings of the Mauritanian courts at all levels and which were submitted to the [African] Commission by both parties, it was not indicated anywhere that the recipient of the donation had claimed that the Complainant’s mother had donated the land because she was the slave of the recipient. On the contrary, the recipient indicated clearly that the Complainant’s mother donated the land to him because of the existence of good ties and relationship