Women’s representation in the ECOWAS Court: a complex narrative unveiled

Women’s representation in gender and judging literature has often depicted a disjointed and incomplete picture. The literature analyses the multiple dimensions of representation – formalistic, descriptive, symbolic, and substantive – independent of each other, sometimes emphasising some over others and scarcely recognising their integrated nature. This paper narrows a knowledge gap by using the ECOWAS Court as a case study to examine the individual strands and interconnections among the four dimensions of women’s representation. It draws on Pitkin’s concept of representation and Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler’s integrated model of representation. The findings reveal a complex character of women’s representation on the ECOWAS bench: it is not representative of women with respect to the formalistic and substantive dimensions of representation but is partly representative of women regarding the descriptive and symbolic dimensions. The paper concludes that although the Court is celebrated for its ­gender-responsive decisions, its representative quality is challenged through the prism of an integrated model of representation and therefore needs improvement.