The Civil Society Associations Gambia (CSAG) has filed an application against the government at the ECOWAS Court of Justice regarding the West African country’s 38 death row inmates at Mile 2 Central Prisons. Banka Manneh, chairman of the CSAG, made the announcement in a statement released by the West African bloc ECOWAS on Monday in the Nigerian capital Abuja. The group accused the Gambian government of violating the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Customary International law.

Public, forceful international pressure on Gambian President Yahya Jammeh to halt ongoing executions of death row prisoners was successful - at least temporarily - leading activists to call for governments, multinationals and human rights groups to exert more sustained pressure on the government to clean up its human rights act. 'For far too long the international and regional community has been far too quiet [on Gambia] - we haven’t been able to test if pressure does indeed work,' said Sherman Nikolaus, an Amnesty International Gambia researcher, who noted that the about-turn shows the president does care about his reputation, internationally and regionally.