In Ghana last week, participants from 20 African nations advanced the latest iteration of the African Inter-Parliamentary “Family, Sovereignty and Values” Charter, a document African rights activists say threatens to dismantle protections for women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in service of a Christian nationalist worldview.
Attendees at the annual conference have set an ambitious goal to realize the document’s illiberal agenda: ratification of the charter by the African Union General Assembly. Organizers hope to take it to the pan-African governmental body next February, where it would be put to a vote.
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“It is a license to oppose, regress on, or refuse to implement existing commitments on sexual and reproductive health, and on LGBTQ rights,” Gilbert Mitullah, a Kenyan lawyer and board member at Queer African Network, told the Guardian. “That is its operational function, even before any signature is placed on it.”
A comprehensive analysis of the latest charter by the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA), a pan-African feminist initiative, reveals that authors have distorted legitimate claims around sovereignty and colonialism in service of a neocolonial goal: the end of abortion, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ rights on the continent.
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It defines a strict two-sex binary, recognizes marriage and family as heterosexual only, and would outlaw comprehensive sexuality education across Africa.
“The charter is not a continental instrument that happens to share vocabulary with Western anti-rights groups,” Kenyan lawyer Mitullah asserted. “It is a transplant.”
Activists point to the organizers of the annual draft-writing conferences. They say the events are supported, organized, and directed by right-wing American and European Christian nationalist organizations.
According to U.S.-based international reproductive rights organization Ipas, the events have been supported by Family Watch International (FWI), the Arizona-based Christian nationalist group run by co-founder Sharon Slater and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Slater has repeatedly claimed that the UN and Western donor nations are imposing a “radical sexual rights agenda” on Africans.
Writing in the Ghana-based Labari Journal, Professor Jeffrey Haynes of London Metropolitan University called FWI and the Netherlands-based Christian Council International two wealthy and influential Western far-right organizations “behind the African faces and the ‘protection-of-family-values-and-sovereignty’ language” employed in the charter.
The charter’s narrow definition of family is one example, excluding any form outside of “traditional” heterosexual marriage, and ignoring what Professor Haynes calls “the continent’s history of tolerance and community-focused ‘living well together’ and respect for diversity.”
CCI claims authorship of the charter, while FWI has been a documented supporter of past conferences and of Uganda’s efforts to adopt “family values” legislation in the East African country. Like FWI, legislators there have called the progressive goals of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights threats to African sovereignty. Uganda’s notorious “Kill the Gays” law is the most pernicious response.
FWI denied participating in or sponsoring the latest conference, in a statement to the Guardian.
“The draft charter is Africa-inspired, African-initiated, and African-directed and controlled,” it claimed.
“That being said,” the group added, “FWI strongly supports the draft charter’s restrictions on the dissemination of harmful [comprehensive sex education] programs in Africa, given their propensity to sexualize children. We also strongly support the provisions encouraging governments to use a family lens when developing and implementing laws, policies, and programs.”
Famia Nkansa, communications director at Purposeful, a Sierra Leone-based young feminists organization, said, “Anti-rights activity on the continent is simply an extension and expansion of the same colonial playbook: Africa serving as a battleground on which the West wages its ideological and economic wars.”
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