The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice is battling a serious compliance deficit, with only 38 of its judgments fully enforced in its 20 years of judicial activity from 2005 to December 2025, and one judgment partially enforced.
The enforcement figures were contained in a paper by a renowned law scholar, Prof. M.uhammed Tawfiq Ladan, titled “The Quest for an Appellate Chamber for the ECOWAS Court of Justice: Building Member States Consensus and ECOWAS Institutions’ Support,” presented in Dakar, Senegal.
According to the data contained in his paper, enforcement is divided almost equally between cases against Member States and cases against ECOWAS Institutions themselves.
Out of the total figure, Member States account for only 19 fully enforced judgments and one partially enforced judgment, despite being the major respondents before the Court.
A breakdown strictly from the paper shows Nigeria leading with 10 fully enforced judgments. The Gambia follows with 4, Senegal with 3, while Liberia, Sierra Leone and Togo have one each, with the Togo case recorded as partially enforced.
The paper reveals that six Member States have no record of enforcement at all within the period under review, namely Benin, Cabo Verde, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea Bissau and Guinea.
On the other hand, ECOWAS Institutions account for 18 enforced judgments, with the ECOWAS Commission accounting for the bulk with 14 cases.
The remaining institutional compliance comes from the ECOWAS Parliament, the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development, the West African Monetary Agency and the West African Power Pool, with one enforced judgment each.
Prof. Ladan in his paper linked the low compliance rate directly to the failure of many Member States to designate Competent National Authorities to receive and enforce writs of execution from the Court, as required by the Court’s Protocol.
He disclosed in the paper that as of August 2024, only 10 out of 15 Member States have complied with appointing a National Authority, a process that began 13 years ago with Nigeria’s appointment.
The 10 countries and their dates of appointment as listed in the paper are Nigeria – June 9, 2011; Togo – June 6, 2018; Ghana – June 11, 2020; Guinea – October 13, 2020; Cote D’Ivoire – March 12, 2022; The Gambia – February 7, 2023; Senegal – June 6, 2023; Guinea Bissau – July 24, 2023; Sierra Leone – November 13, 2023; and Liberia – August 5, 2024.
This leaves five Member States that are yet to appoint any authority as of August 2024, which are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Mali and Niger.
Ladan recalled in the paper that the issue of compliance was also at the front burner at the 2025 ECOWAS Court Meeting on Compliance, where stakeholders stressed the need to strengthen the capacity of National Authorities.
He warned in the paper that establishing an Appellate Chamber alone will not solve the compliance problem, noting that of the four major issues to be considered – resource intensiveness, amendment of protocols, scope of appeal, and compliance mechanisms – the last is the most critical.
To address it, he recommended in the paper that the ECCJ should emulate the Court of Justice of the European Union, CJEU, which achieves high compliance by influencing national legal systems to enforce its rulings through regular bilateral meetings.
He further proposed in the paper the adoption of an ECJ-like preliminary ruling procedure, where national courts refer questions of ECOWAS law to the ECCJ for interpretation, arguing that this will foster cooperation rather than competition.
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