President John Dramani Mahama stood in Arusha on Monday and spoke in the language of principle. As the first sitting Ghanaian president invited to address the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, he told fellow African leaders they had "nothing to fear" from a court designed to protect rather than persecute. He invoked the memory of his own father, detained after the 1966 coup, forced into exile for thirteen years, to argue that no victim of injustice should stand alone. He declared that "without independent courts and respect for judicial decisions, rights become promises on paper." He urged the continent to "step into its greatness."