Join us for a talk with Niklas Hultin, University of Cambridge, on his recent research paper. Drawing on the “new” anthropology of human rights that has developed since the early 2000s in which the “culture of human rights” has been a central question, this paper asks to what extent this idea of an African heritage or African traditions has informed the African Commission’s view of human rights. In the first part of the paper, he reviews the relevant case law of the African Commission and in the second part of the paper they draw on ethnographic research conducted at the Commission’s secretariat and sessions in Banjul, as well as interviews with its various interlocutors (e.g. NGOs). Drawing on this data, he argues that there is not much to the African fingerprint and that disagreements about specific human rights issues (disagreements that would be couched in terms of cultural difference and relativism, following the Asian Values debate of the 1990s and much of the literature surrounding issues like FGM ) are framed not in terms of African values but in terms of procedural accuracy and fidelity.