mandate. Provisions of the African Women’s Rights Protocol, in particular, prove to be fertile ground for analysis and discussion (see for example the articles by Anyangwe, Boshoff, Chekeru-Radu, Zvobgo and Dziva, Erychalu and Durojaye, Guignard, Owiso and Sefah, Oyugi and Rabenoro). The middle sibling is the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (African Children’s Committee). Initially taking some hesitant steps, it was viewed by many as the stepchild of the African human rights system. At the time of the publication of this Yearbook, 18 years has lapsed since the entry into force of the treaty this Committee supervises, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (African Children’s Rights Charter). Since its inauguration, the seat of the Committee has been with the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, but, at the time of this publication, its relocation is under consideration. It is fair to state that the African Children’s Committee has matured into an effective and active champion for children’s rights in Africa, as the article by the current Chairperson of the Committee, Professor Benyam Mezmur, illustrates. The youngest sibling of the three is the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Human Rights Court). Hardly a decade in operation, with its first judgment handed down in 2009, the African Human Rights Court has already left its mark on Africa’s human rights landscape. As this Yearbook appears, eleven merits judgments have been delivered, leading to decisions of human rights violations by States: nine direct-access cases, directly submitted to the Court (six cases against Tanzania; two against Burkina Faso; and one against Côte d’Ivoire); and two indirect-access cases, submitted by the African Commission (African Commission (Saif Al-Islam Kadhafi) v Libya and African Commission (Ogiek) v Kenya). In addition, the Court issued a number of advisory opinions, and handed down three judgments in which it clarified the implementation of previous judgments. Contributors in this Yearbook grapple with issues such as the relationship between the African Commission and the African Human Rights Court (see the article by Yerima); the challenge of effective implementation of the Court’s remedial orders (see the article by Murray et al; and Nyman-Metcalf and Papageorgiou); and the tension between regional specificity and universalism in the Court’s jurisprudence (as reflected in the article by Ondo). Three main themes are covered in this Yearbook: the norms and standards that form the basis of the regional system; the institutions that supervise these norms and standards, and make them part of people’s lived realities; and the rights of women and children. A number of the contributions deal with these issues in a cross-cutting way, or place them in a broader context. Here is a brief chronology of this first volume of the Yearbook: The Yearbook was announced late in 2016, with a call for papers closing in February 2017. The process was initiated under the complementarity cooperation between the Commission and the Court, later joined by the Children’s Committee. Initial ground-work was done by a team of enthusiastic staff members of the three institutions (see the xiii