Our rights are non-negotiable: How reservations to the Maputo Protocol are holding back women’s rights in Africa

By Deborah Nyokabi and Gicuku Karugu, Legal Equality Experts, Equality Now

Nairobi, Kenya, July 11, 2025: July 2025 marks 22 years since the adoption of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa – known as the Maputo Protocol – by the African Union Heads of State Assembly. Over the past two decades, the Protocol has played a pivotal role in advancing the rights of women and girls across the continent. Yet, despite this progress, its full promise remains unfulfilled for millions due to shortfalls in ratification, domestication, and effective implementation by many African governments.

Reservations to the Maputo Protocol – instances when states choose not to be bound by specific provisions of the treaty – continue to limit key rights such as access to safe abortion, protection from child marriage, fair legal treatment in divorce, and the right to inherit property. 

These reservations, often supported by cultural or religious justifications,  have real-life and potentially devastating consequences, particularly for survivors of gender-based violence and marginalised women and girls who are especially in need of legal protection.

Women’s rights are increasingly under threat from rollback

Reservations against the Protocol constrict the scope of legal protections at a time when hard-won women’s rights are increasingly being undermined by rollbacks around the world. In Africa and elsewhere, anti-gender actors are a serious threat to women’s rights, gender and sexuality diversity, and democracy itself.

This concerning trend is highlighted in Equality Now’s 2025 report, Words & Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable in the Beijing+30 Review Process, which identifies how legal protections for women and girls in some countries have been weakened or overturned through regressive legislative changes, judicial rulings, and funding cuts. 

State reservations against the Maputo Protocol hinder women’s human rights

The option to enter reservations on treaty documents is integral to the international human rights system. It serves as a tool for encouraging states to ratify treaty documents with the assurance that they can maintain and protect their sovereignty. However, this flexibility comes with significant drawbacks to human rights as a whole.

The Maputo Protocol is a legally binding treaty that seeks to “ensure that the rights of women are promoted, realised and protected in order to enable them to fully enjoy all their human rights.” When states enter reservations, they effectively lower the minimum human rights standards established by the Protocol within their jurisdictions, undermining its overall impact. As a result, reservations have hindered, both legally and in practice, the treaty’s ability to comprehensively improve the lives of women and girls in the affected countries.

For example, Uganda’s reservations to Article 14(1)(a), which calls for adequate, affordable and accessible health services, and Article 14(2)(c), focusing on protecting women’s reproductive rights, has significantly limited women’s reproductive autonomy and has contribute to high rates of unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions, particularly among survivors of rape and incest. 

In Kenya, the reservation to Article 14(2)(c) contradicts its own Constitution and contributes to at least 2,600 maternal deaths annually from unsafe abortions. Kenya has also opted out of commitments under Article 10(3), which calls on States Parties to take necessary measures to reduce military expenditure, resulting in lower investment for essential maternal healthcare and social development. 

Mauritius’s reservation on Article 14(2)(c) has prevented the provision of comprehensive reproductive healthcare. While allowing abortion under limited circumstances, imposing police reporting requirements and a 14-week limit leaves many women and girls without viable options. 

State reservations of the Maputo Protocol are failing families and women

Countries’ reservations to Article 6, which relates to marriage, enable marriage inequality and child marriage. For example, Ethiopia and South Africa’s reservations permit unregistered marriages, exposing women to increased risk of child marriage and denying them legal protections in marital disputes.

Namibia’s failure to recognise customary marriages means women in such unions lack legal safeguards in divorce or inheritance, a situation unaddressed even in its new Marriage Act of 2024.

In Algeria, the state’s reservation allows for exceptions to the legal minimum age of marriage, enabling child marriage to persist under civil and customary law. Reservations on Article 7 – governing separation, divorce and annulment of marriage – restrict women’s ability to seek divorce unless they meet specific conditions. Even in no-fault cases, women must pay a cash settlement to their husbands. 

Meanwhile, Algeria’s reservations against Article 14, which outlines reproductive rights, have also fostered conditions that perpetuate child marriage, obstruct women’s access to divorce, and deny rape survivors access to safe abortion. 

Reservations to Article 7 in Ethiopia enable non-judicial separations, with couples informally separating without going to court. This undermines legal oversight and often results in unfair property settlements and loss of child custody for women.

Ethiopia’s reservation to Article 21 on inheritance limits widows’ rights as the state requires them to be explicitly named in a will, leaving many economically vulnerable. In the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), reservations block widows’ rights to protection from degrading treatment and undermine their custodial and remarriage rights, reinforcing patriarchal control and exclusion.

The SADR has issued multiple sweeping reservations, including on integrating gender perspectives in national policy, ensuring equality in family law, and protecting widows’ rights. These undermine not only legal reforms but the broader societal shifts required for gender equality. Restrictions on reproductive rights further compound the oppression of women in this territory. 

Calling on governments to withdraw reservations against the Maputo Protocol

The adoption in March 2025 of Resolution 632 (LXXXII) 2025 on the Need to Raise Awareness for States to Withdraw Reservations on Some Provisions of the Maputo Protocol by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights is a welcome move as this resolution will help develop a framework to guide African Union Member States on lifting reservations in collaboration with stakeholders, including Equality Now.

In the face of growing resistance to gender equality and mounting efforts to erode women’s rights across Africa and globally, the Maputo Protocol stands as a robust legal framework to safeguard hard-won gains and push for further progress. However, the Protocol’s transformative potential can only be fulfilled if states withdraw the reservations that dilute its protections. These carve-outs deny millions of women and girls access to justice, safety, autonomy, and equality. 

It is imperative that all stakeholders stand together to resist the growing anti-gender backlash and hold the line in defence of equality and justice for all. Women’s human rights are not negotiable. They are inalienable, indivisible, interdependent, and universal. 

At this pivotal moment, African governments must uphold all their legal and moral obligations under the Protocol and collaborate meaningfully with civil society to ensure that every woman and girl in Africa can live with dignity, free from violence, discrimination, and inequality. 

ENDS

Notes to editors

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