Violence towards girls and ladies in Africa calls for pressing motion. As of 2023, it’s estimated that one in three girls and ladies between ages 15 and 49, have skilled bodily and/or sexual intimate companion violence of their lifetime. Final November, South Africa categorized violence towards girls as a nationwide catastrophe.
When the African Union adopted its Conference on Ending Violence In opposition to Girls and Women in early 2025, UN Girls and a number of other governments celebrated it as progress. However throughout the continent, girls’s rights organizations are warning towards untimely optimism and calling for the treaty to be strengthened.
Certainly, the African Union wants to extend compliance with the present authorized framework, and strengthen the newest one, whether it is to result in tangible enhancements for girls and ladies.
Africa already had one of many world’s most progressive regional frameworks addressing this disaster: the Protocol to the African Constitution on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Girls in Africa, generally referred to as the Maputo Protocol, adopted in 2003 (efficient 2005). Maputo ensures complete protections; from usually obligating states to enact and implement legal guidelines to ban all types of violence towards girls to taking applicable measures to stop and remove such violence.
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Nevertheless, there have been vital setbacks to implementing it, reminiscent of gradual passage of nationwide legal guidelines and enforcement, and reservations by some international locations on key provisions–reproductive well being and protected abortion, equality in marriage. The brand new conference will face comparable obstacles if the AU would not deal with the warnings that it might be used to water down protections already assured beneath Maputo, burden governments with duplicate reporting necessities, and create confusion round enforcement due to the competing authorized frameworks.
Organizations just like the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA) and Akina Mama wa Afrika have famous beneath the initiative #PauseforPurpose, the chance that the conference may result in backsliding. The African Bar Affiliation has already revealed mannequin reservations suggesting governments water down the conference’s commitments.
Studies from grassroots organizations and survivor-led teams that they had been shut out of consultations in drafting the brand new conference are troubling. Fos Feminista, the Centre for Human Rights on the College of Pretoria, and the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Research have all raised purple flags. When credible voices throughout the continent sound the alarm, their warnings warrant cautious consideration.
The AU Conference on Ending Violence In opposition to Girls and Women consists of some provisions that add to the Maputo Protocol: express protections towards cyberviolence and femicide, stronger office harassment provisions, and a spotlight to marginalized teams like girls with disabilities and refugees. These are vital provisions that align with worldwide treaties together with the Conference on the Rights of Individuals with Disabilities and the Worldwide Labour Group (ILO) Violence and Harassment Conference (C190) on violence on the planet of labor.
Nevertheless, the conference, with its narrower operational focus, would not explicitly incorporate the excellent rights framework for stopping violence reminiscent of Maputo’s provisions for sexual and reproductive well being rights, together with entry to protected abortion (article 14), and on equality in marriage, divorce, and inheritance (articles 6 and seven), and safeguards towards little one, early, and compelled marriages.
The Committee of the Conference on the Elimination of All Types of Discrimination towards Girls (CEDAW), the physique that interprets the worldwide treaty, affirmed that violence towards girls is inseparable from structural discrimination, together with denial of sexual and reproductive well being and rights, and inequality in marriage and household relations.
Any regional framework that addresses violence with out confronting the underlying inequality dangers treating signs fairly than root causes. At a minimal, the African Union ought to be sure that the Conference on Ending Violence is learn along with the complete scope of Maputo’s obligations to enrich and improve them and to not diminish them.
The doc is riddled with obscure language, reminiscent of “constructive masculinity” and “African values and norms,” that might threat loopholes for enforceable rights, by arguing for cultural discretion.
We have already seen this play out with Cameroon’s and Uganda’s reservations to the Maputo Protocol, contending that some provisions are inconsistent with African moral and ethical values or rules, although Maputo additionally acknowledges “the essential function of girls within the preservation of African values primarily based on the rules of equality, peace, freedom, dignity, justice, solidarity and democracy.” With out clear definitions, the brand new conference may very well be used to open the door wider.
The brand new conference depends on the African Fee on Human and Peoples’ Rights to observe its implementation–as it already does with the Maputo Protocol–rather than creating a brand new treaty physique. The fee already faces vital challenges, primarily attributable to extreme useful resource constraints and a heavy current workload. For it to behave as a monitoring physique for the conference, and to stop weakening the present authorized framework, the AU wants to offer clear steerage on the connection between the 2 devices and overlapping obligations, and requirements to keep away from problems in reporting and an elevated pressure on an enforcement system that already lacks enough assets.
On the identical time calls to “pause ratification” additionally require warning. In AU observe, extended ratification pauses have usually led to political stagnation fairly than substantive reform, permitting states to evade each current and new obligations. Furthermore, a pause with out a clear AU-mandated evaluate course of dangers creating uncertainty and fragmented obligations throughout governments, with some continuing with ratification and others not, operating counter to AU norms of requiring all international locations to fulfill the identical requirements.
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As soon as the AU has adopted a treaty, it has not historically suspended or paused ratification, even when vital gaps existed, however as a substitute it has favored progressive growth that enhances current necessities.
According to its treaty-making norms, as occurred with the Malabo Protocol amending the African Courtroom Statute, a mechanism to shut the gaps may take the type of an modification or interpretive protocol that clarifies the connection between Maputo and the brand new conference and reinforces current obligations, whereas avoiding creating parallel regimes, or interpretations that decrease established requirements.
The trail to ending violence towards girls and ladies in Africa requires first getting states to ratify the Maputo Protocol with out reservations and to push for governments which have reservations to withdraw them. It means the AU ought to improve funding for strong implementation and monitoring mechanisms, together with extra assets allotted to the Fee to match the enlargement of its mandates.
Within the meantime, the AU ought to decide to addressing gaps in its new Conference on Ending Violence by inclusive consultations with civil society. Significant participation is just not a courtesy; it’s a foundational precept of the African Constitution. A conference of this nature with out strong session dangers undermining its personal legitimacy. We can’t afford to proceed losing time.
Juliana Nnoko, Senior Advisor/Affiliate Director, Girls’s Rights Division