Tomorrow (21 August), the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council (PSC) will convene its 1363^rd session for a consultation with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR).

Following opening remarks by Mohamed Khaled, Permanent Representative of Algeria to the AU and Chairperson of the PSC for August, Bankole Adeoye, AU Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security (PAPS), is expected to deliver a statement. The Chairperson of the ACHPR is also expected to deliver a briefing to the PSC on the ACHPR’s work as it relates to peace and security.

The consultative meeting is being convened pursuant to Article 19 of the PSC Protocol, which calls for close cooperation between the PSC and the ACHPR in advancing peace, security, and stability across the continent. Building on this provision, the PSC, at its 866^th Session in August 2019, resolved to institutionalise the engagement through annual joint consultative sessions with the ACHPR. This commitment rests on a shared legal and normative foundation: Article 3(f) of the PSC Protocol identifies the promotion of human rights as integral to conflict prevention, Article 45 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights mandates the ACHPR to promote and protect the rights of individuals and communities, and Article 23 of the African Charter affirms the right of all peoples to live in peace and security. Taken together, these provisions position the PSC-ACHPR consultation as the institutional space through which the AU’s peace and security architecture and its human rights architecture are meant to speak to one another.

Tomorrow’s meeting follows the 1284^th session held on 19 June 2025, which marked the resumption of joint consultations after a three-year interruption. While the session reaffirmed its commitment to deepening collaboration with the ACHPR, notably through consistent information exchange and by institutionalising and regularising the consultation as an annual fixture, the session outcome document was largely couched in general terms and missed critical opportunities to operationalise concrete cooperation. Specifically, the session failed to build upon practical modalities established during the 866^th session.

The overarching question for the consultation is how the PSC and ACHPR can pool their respective mandates, tools and networks to translate human rights protection into a more effective conflict prevention, peacebuilding and sustaining peace. This matters because human rights violations are not only consequences of armed conflict but can themselves function as early-warning indicators and drivers of conflict. The ACHPR’s own report on addressing Human Rights issues in conflict situations has identified monitoring and response, prevention, the mainstreaming of human rights across the conflict cycle, remedial action and institutional coordination as the areas requiring the greatest attention. Its Special Rapporteurs, Working Groups, and fact-finding and promotional missions generate a significant body of information and expertise that could strengthen the PSC’s preventive and protective action, provided that information is translated into timely political engagement rather than remaining confined within the human rights system.

The effectiveness of these mechanisms, however, also depends on their ability to draw on information and perspectives from actors closest to the situations they monitor. This places civil society organisations at an important intersection between human rights monitoring and the AU’s peace and security efforts. CSOs can channel information from communities that might not otherwise reach AU institutions, contribute to early warning, document violations, support victims and survivors, facilitate dialogue, and contribute to accountability and reconciliation. The ACHPR’s Joint Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan illustrates this value directly: its evidentiary record has drawn substantially on testimony from victims, witnesses and other stakeholders, including through direct engagement with Sudanese refugees in Chad, and its mandate, extended in May 2026, emphasised the need for independent monitoring, preservation of evidence, a victim-centred approach, accountability and civilian protection. The relevance of this channel is sharpened by deteriorating civic space in several conflict and crisis settings, which the ACHPR addressed directly in its June 2026 Resolution ACHPR/Res.663 (LXXXVII) on the Situation of Human and Peoples’ Rights Defenders in Africa, expressing concern over the criminalisation of legitimate civil society activity and calling on States to protect freedoms of association and peaceful assembly. The consultation could therefore explore how the ACHPR’s extensive networks of NGOs, National Human Rights Institutions and special mechanisms might be connected more systematically to the PSC’s early-warning and conflict-prevention architecture, while ensuring that civil society actors engaged in this work are themselves protected, an approach that could strengthen the quality and timeliness of information available to the Council, particularly where official reporting is limited, contested or delayed.

The Sudan experience illustrates the potential of such cooperation in practice. The ACHPR’s Joint Fact-Finding Mission, established in 2024 and extended for a further year in May 2026, has documented serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, and its May 2026 Banjul Joint Declaration with the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission stressed that a sustainable future for Sudan requires an inclusive, civilian-led political process with the meaningful participation of women, youth, civil society and communities from all regions, treating human rights findings, political process and peacebuilding as connected rather than separate tracks. A similar logic runs through the Commission’s other conflict-related work: its recent promotional mission to the DRC highlighted the continuing human rights and humanitarian consequences of conflict there, while its earlier engagement on South Sudan linked escalating violence to stalled implementation of the peace agreement. Both cases underline the value of ensuring the ACHPR’s country-level findings reach the PSC while situations remain under active consideration, rather than only after the fact, and both point toward the accountability question that the 953^rd and 1019^th sessions had already begun to address. At those sessions, the Council acknowledged the ACHPR’s contribution to transitional justice and called for the peaceful resolution of conflicts through dialogue, negotiation, mediation and consensual transitional justice mechanisms, alongside investigation of violations and accountability for perpetrators. Tomorrow’s consultation offers an occasion to examine how that expertise can complement the PSC’s political and mediation efforts more directly, including on reparations, reconciliation and guarantees of non-recurrence.

Tomorrow’s session is also expected to centre on the strategic priorities of the ACHPR’s new Bureau and their contribution to peace and security. The election of a new Bureau in October 2025, the adoption of the Commission’s Strategic Plan 2026 – 2028, and the subsequent adoption of the implementation, planning, monitoring and evaluation frameworks by the 87th Ordinary Session, provide an opportunity for the PSC to engage early with the Bureau’s priorities and identify areas of mutual reinforcement, particularly given the breadth of the Commission’s current conflict-related work. Beyond the Sudan Fact-Finding Mission, the ACHPR has undertaken a promotional mission to the DRC, strengthened engagement with international human rights mechanisms, and, at its 87^th Ordinary Session, adopted further resolutions with direct implications for conflict prevention and civic space. As such, the presentation offers an opportunity to identify where joint planning, information sharing, and the complementary use of institutional tools could generate greater preventive impact.

The Session is also expected to follow up on previous decisions and assess how to move from six years of accumulated commitments to measurable action. Given the strength of the practical modalities agreed at the 866^th session, particular attention is likely to be given to their implementation, including undertaking joint field visits to conflict-affected and post-conflict countries, communicating PSC decisions with human rights implications to the ACHPR, and facilitating regular ACHPR briefings on the human rights dimensions of situations on the PSC agenda. This suggests that the key challenge is one of implementation rather than a lack of substantive agreement, making a review of the implementation matrix an opportunity to identify which commitments have been fulfilled, which remain outstanding, the constraints affecting implementation, and the responsibilities and timelines required to address these gaps. This is particularly important for early warning: the 866^th session requested that ‘the AU Commission and the ACHPR Secretariat propose a modality for the establishment of a coordinated early warning mechanism on human rights-related issues on the Continent between the two Organs’. The consultation could thus provide an opportunity to revisit these commitments and consider practical modalities for systematically feeding ACHPR-generated information into CEWS assessments, allowing human rights-related warning signals to inform preventive action before violations escalate.

The expected outcome of the session is a communiqué. The PSC and ACHPR may renew their commitment to strengthened cooperation and joint action. The communiqué may identify specific roles for NGOs, National Human Rights Institutions and other civil society actors in early warning, monitoring, mediation, protection, accountability and reconciliation, while encouraging the ACHPR to draw more systematically on its civil society networks and special mechanisms, with due attention to their own protection. The Council may welcome the strategic priorities of the ACHPR’s new Bureau and encourage closer alignment between the Strategic Plan 2026-2028 and AU peace and security priorities through coordinated work planning and information-sharing. It may further underscore the importance of mainstreaming human rights standards throughout conflict prevention, management, stabilisation, resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, including through the integration of ACHPR analysis into the CEWS. On implementation, the communiqué may call for an updated joint implementation matrix with clearly identified responsibilities, timelines and follow-up mechanisms covering outstanding commitments, regular information-sharing, ACHPR participation in relevant PSC sessions, joint field or assessment missions and early-warning cooperation. It may also encourage continued ACHPR advisory support on transitional justice and accountability, and underscore the importance of integrating women’s meaningful participation and prevention of conflict-related sexual violence into AU peace and security efforts, so that the consultation moves beyond reaffirming complementarity towards a partnership in which human rights information and tools are put to active use in early warning, prevention, protection and sustaining peace.