PRACTICE NOTE 5 5 STRATEGIC LITIGATION OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES IN AFRICA INTRODUCTION Through strategic litigation, human rights lawyers seek to challenge both the individual act of enforced disappearance and the policies and practices that enabled it to take place. Through this approach you can obtain accountability, and campaign for policy and legal reform to make it more difficult for disappearances to take place in the future. In addition to filing legal cases, strategic litigation also uses other civil society techniques to bring about change, such as advocacy (national, regional, international), activism, and engaging the media, academia and the general public. With such litigation there is a risk that the interests of the individual survivors of enforced disappearance are side-lined in the attempt to bring about broader change. To avoid this, lawyers and activists should adopt a holistic approach, where all the needs of survivors are provided for, and they have a central role in the litigation and the strategy. There are many ways to approach the courts to obtain justice and the different forms of redress. Human rights litigation can be used on behalf of an individual survivor of enforced disappearance to hold governments to account before national courts, the regional human rights systems, and the UN Treaty Bodies and Charter based procedures. Criminal law can be used to punish individual perpetrators on a national or international basis, or through universal jurisdiction. Through civil cases, people can sue individuals and companies to prove their responsibility for enforced disappearances and other violations and obtain reparations. With strategic litigation, civil society seeks to go beyond individual responsibility and individual representation, to ensure there is impact after the legal decision, a community behind the client, and a cause beyond the case. However, change can be slow, and, in many cases, litigation seeks social advances that may take a generation or more to achieve.