Tug of War: LGBTQ+ Rights in the African Human Rights Architecture

Regional Organizations (ROs) can constitute an arena for the negotiation of human rights of LGBTQ+ persons. However, invoking the narrative of UnAfricanness of LGBTQ+ Africans is used to (mis)appropriate this human rights architecture and use an “anti-colonial” narrative to not include LGBTQ+ persons. We argue that the design choices for ROs are a way of claiming a human rights institutionalization, while appropriating certain narratives to exclude the safeguarding of certain peoples’ rights – making ROs highly contested arenas. These contestations can be understood as a tug of war. We illustrate this along three cases within the African Union (AU): Resolution 275, the (de-)registration of the Coalition of African Lesbians, and the AU Committees’ role for LGBTQ+ rights. On these regional interrelated arenas within the AU, we ask: how are these tug of war dynamics carried out among state actors, and between state and non-state actors within the regional arenas?