Tug-of-war: LGBTIQ+ rights in the African human rights architecture

Regional organisations can constitute an arena for the negotiation of the human rights of sexual and gender minorities. They facilitate this through institutionalised bodies within their human rights architecture and fora for the involvement of non-state actors. However, the narrative of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer Africans' so-called 'un-Africanness' is often invoked to (mis)appropriate these spaces, using 'anti-imperialist/anti-colonial' rhetoric to exclude LGBTIQ+ persons from human rights protection. In this article we argue that the design choices for regional organisations are both a means of establishing institutionalised human rights frameworks and offer mechanisms for selectively appropriating narratives that justify the exclusion of certain groups from rights protections. This makes regional organisations highly contested spaces where norms, policies and power structures are in continuous negotiation. We conceptualise these contestations as a tug-of-war over which rights and whose identities are recognised within these frameworks. To unpack this struggle over whose human rights are acknowledged and whose are questioned and denied, we examine two key cases in the regional human rights arena of the African Union. These cases are the (de)registration of the Coalition of African Lesbians and the adoption and implementation of Resolution 275 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. Within these interrelated regional arenas of the AU, critical questions emerge, namely, how these tug-of-war dynamics are carried out among state actors, and how these conflicts unfold between state and non-state actors within the AU's regional spaces.