s of 2023, it’s estimated that one in three girls and women between ages 15 and 49, have skilled bodily and/or sexual intimate accomplice violence of their lifetime.
Violence in opposition to girls and women in Africa calls for pressing motion. As of 2023, it’s estimated that one in three girls and women between ages 15 and 49, have skilled bodily and/or sexual intimate accomplice violence of their lifetime. Final November, South Africa labeled violence in opposition to girls as a nationwide catastrophe.
When the African Union adopted its Conference on Ending Violence Towards Girls and Ladies in early 2025, UN Girls and several other governments celebrated it as progress. However throughout the continent, girls’s rights organisations are warning in opposition to 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 most recent one, whether it is to result in tangible enhancements for girls and women.
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 in opposition to girls to taking applicable measures to stop and get rid of such violence.
Nonetheless, there have been important setbacks to implementing it, equivalent to gradual passage of nationwide legal guidelines and enforcement, and reservations by some nations on key provisions—reproductive well being and protected abortion, equality in marriage. The brand new conference will face comparable obstacles if the AU doesn’t tackle the warnings that it could 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.
Organisations just like the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA) and Akina Mama wa Afrika have famous beneath the initiative #PauseforPurpose, the danger that the conference would possibly result in backsliding. The African Bar Affiliation has already revealed mannequin reservations suggesting governments water down the conference’s commitments.
Reviews from grassroots organisations and survivor-led teams that they have 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 Towards Girls and Ladies consists of some provisions that add to the Maputo Protocol: express protections in opposition to cyberviolence and femicide, stronger office harassment provisions, and a focus to marginalised 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 Organisation (ILO) Violence and Harassment Conference (C190)on violence on the planet of labor.
Nonetheless, the conference, with its narrower operational focus, doesn’t explicitly incorporate the great rights framework for stopping violence equivalent to 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 in opposition to baby, early, and compelled marriages.
The Committee of the Conference on the Elimination of All Types of Discrimination in opposition to Girls (CEDAW), the physique that interprets the worldwide treaty, affirmed that violence in opposition to 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 slightly than root causes. At a minimal, the African Union ought to be certain that the Conference on Ending Violence is learn along with the total scope of Maputo’s obligations to enhance and improve them and to not diminish them.
The doc is riddled with imprecise language, equivalent to “constructive masculinity” and “African values and norms,” that would danger loopholes for enforceable rights, by arguing for cultural discretion.
We’ve 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 recognises “the essential function of girls within the preservation of African values based mostly 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—because it already does with the Maputo Protocol—slightly than creating a brand new treaty physique. The fee already faces important challenges, primarily on account of 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 supply clear steerage on the connection between the 2 devices and overlapping obligations, and requirements to keep away from issues in reporting and an elevated pressure on an enforcement system that already lacks sufficient assets.
On the similar time calls to “pause ratification” additionally require warning. In AU observe, extended ratification pauses have typically led to political stagnation slightly than substantive reform, permitting states to evade each current and new obligations. Furthermore, a pause with out a clear AU-mandated assessment course of dangers creating uncertainty and fragmented obligations throughout governments, with some continuing with ratification and others not, working counter to AU norms of requiring all nations to satisfy the identical requirements.
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 improvement that enhances current necessities.
In keeping with its treaty-making norms, as occurred with the Malabo Protocol amending the African Court docket Statute, a mechanism to shut the gaps might 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 in opposition to girls and women 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 enhance funding for sturdy 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 via inclusive consultations with civil society. Significant participation isn’t a courtesy; it’s a foundational precept of the African Constitution. A conference of this nature with out sturdy session dangers undermining its personal legitimacy. We can not afford to proceed losing time.
Juliana Nnoko is a senior girls’s rights advisor at Human Rights Watch.
