Africa’s New Treaty on Violence Against Women: A Decolonial Turn in Global Feminist Law?

[Dr Julie Ada Tchoukou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law and a licensed lawyer in Ontario. She was previously the Allan Rock Visiting Professor and a Shirley Greenberg Fellow in Women and the Legal Profession.]

In February 2025, the African Union adopted the Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (CEVAWG), the first binding continental treaty dedicated exclusively to addressing gender-based violence. Its adoption coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action; a moment widely framed as an opportunity to assess global progress on gender equality. But CEVAWG is more than a regional addition to an already dense legal landscape. It raises a deeper question. What does it mean for Africa not only to implement global feminist norms, but to produce them?

At first glance, CEVAWG appears redundant. Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is already addressed through international and regional frameworks, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), its General Recommendations on gender-based violence, and the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol). Why, then, another treaty?

This post argues that CEVAWG is not simply another layer of legal obligation. Rather, it represents a decolonial intervention into global feminist governance, one that both complements and critiques existing frameworks. Its significance lies not only in what it regulates, but in how it reframes the problem of violence, the subjects of protection, and the authority to define feminist legal norms.

The Limits of Global Frameworks

For decades, efforts to combat VAWG have been anchored in global human rights instruments. CEDAW, adopted in 1979, remains the cornerstone of women’s rights law, conceptualizing gender-based violence as a form of discrimination. However, it does so indirectly. Violence is not explicitly codified in the treaty text but emerges through interpretive guidance, particularly General Recommendations 19 and 35. While influential, these are non-binding.

This gap has long been recognized. Successive UN Special Rapporteurs on violence against women have noted the difficulty of holding states accountable in the absence of a dedicated, binding global treaty. Soft law has played a significant role in norm development, but its limits are evident in persistent implementation failures.

Regional instruments have attempted to fill this gap. The Maputo Protocol, adopted in 2003, is widely regarded as one of the most progressive women’s rights frameworks in international law. It addresses issues such as reproductive rights, harmful practices, and HIV/AIDS with notable contextual sensitivity. Similarly, the Istanbul Convention in Europe establishes comprehensive standards on prevention, protection, and prosecution.

Yet even these instruments leave important gaps. Emerging forms of violence (digital abuse, climate-related displacement, violence in informal economies) remain unevenly addressed. More fundamentally, global and regional frameworks often rely on universal categories that inadequately capture the lived realities of women in the Global South.

Violence in Context: Why Africa Matters

Violence against women in Africa is both globally recognizable and locally specific. It includes intimate partner violence, sexual violence, child marriage, and female genital mutilation, but is also shaped by structural conditions such as conflict, displacement, economic precarity, and legal pluralism.

In many contexts, violence is normalized as a private matter, resolved within families or communities rather than through formal legal systems. Survivors often face stigma, victim-blaming, and social exclusion. Reporting rates remain low, not only because of cultural pressures but also due to distrust in state institutions, which are frequently perceived as corrupt, inaccessible, or complicit.

These dynamics are not incidental. They are rooted in broader histories of colonialism, militarization, and economic marginalization. Colonial legal systems reshaped gender relations, entrenched patriarchal norms, and introduced legal frameworks that continue to structure contemporary inequalities. 

CEVAWG reflects an awareness of these layered realities in its design. Articles 1 and 3 provide an expansive definition of violence, encompassing not only domestic and sexual violence, but also femicide, cyberviolence, economic exploitation in informal labour, and harms associated with conflict and disasters. This definitional breadth marks a clear departure from earlier frameworks and situates violence within the lived realities of African women. 

Understanding VAWG in Africa requires more than the application of universal norms; it necessitates sustained engagement with context, history, and power.

CEVAWG as a Decolonial Intervention

CEVAWG enters this landscape at a critical moment. Adopted at Beijing+30, it signals a shift in how feminist legal authority is constituted. Where Beijing universalized the principle that “women’s rights are human rights”, CEVAWG asserts that the articulation of those rights must also be grounded in diverse epistemic and political locations.

From a decolonial feminist perspective, this shift is significant. Decolonial feminism challenges the dominance of Western epistemologies in global governance, calling for the recognition of plural ways of knowing, being, and organizing social life. It critiques the assumption that universal frameworks can be seamlessly applied across contexts, highlighting instead the need for locally grounded, historically informed approaches.

CEVAWG reflects this orientation in several ways.

First, CEVAWG explicitly recognizes intersectional vulnerabilities. The Preamble and Articles 7-9 acknowledge that violence is shaped by overlapping forms of discrimination, including race, ethnicity, disability, age, socioeconomic status, and geography. These provisions also identify heightened risks faced by refugees, internally displaced persons, and women in informal economies. By addressing violence in spaces such as the workplace, cyberspace, and informal labour sectors (Arts. 8-9), the Convention goes beyond narrow legal categories and engages with everyday realities.

Second, CEVAWG reconceptualizes the role of culture. Articles 6 and 10 depart from the tendency to frame culture solely as a source of harm. Instead, they recognize “African values and norms” as potential resources for transformation, including through the promotion of “positive masculinity” and community-based strategies. This reframing challenges epistemic hierarchies that portray African societies as inherently patriarchal or in need of external correction. However, at the same time, it introduces a concern; without adequate safeguards, appeals to culture may be mobilized to reinforce patriarchal authority.

Third, the Convention embeds participatory governance within its framework. Article 11(2) explicitly requires states to engage with and protect women human rights defenders and civil society organizations. This provision is reinforced by obligations on data collection and knowledge production (Arts. 4(a)(ii), 5(c)), creating space for grassroots actors to shape both policy and implementation. In doing so, CEVAWG recognizes African women not merely as beneficiaries of legal protection, but as producers of knowledge and agents of change.

Taken together, these elements position CEVAWG as more than a technical legal instrument. It becomes a site of epistemic intervention; an assertion that Africa is not merely a recipient of global norms, but an active producer of feminist international law.

Risks, Silences, and Tensions

This is not to suggest that CEVAWG is unproblematic. A closer reading of its provisions reveals a series of tensions that complicate its decolonial promise.

Perhaps most significantly, the Convention remains deeply state-centric. It relies heavily on state institutions (legislation, policing, courts) for implementation. Yet for many African women, the state is not only a protector but also a source of violence. Police abuse, militarization, and discriminatory laws complicate the assumption that strengthening state capacity will necessarily reduce violence. Although CEVAWG gestures toward accountability for both state and non-state actors (e.g., Art. 7(f)), it stops short of fully confronting the structural complicity of state institutions in producing gendered violence.

The Convention’s emphasis on criminal justice responses raises further concerns. While accountability is essential, an overreliance on punitive approaches risks reproducing carceral logics that do little to address the structural drivers of violence. Survivors often seek solutions that prioritize safety, economic support, and social reconciliation over prosecution, needs that are not always well served by formal legal systems. This issue is only partially mitigated by CEVAWG’s recognition of community actors (Art. 11(2)), leaving unresolved questions about how plural justice systems might be meaningfully integrated.

Moreover, access to justice remains uneven. Many women face significant barriers, including cost, distance, stigma, and institutional bias. Even where legal frameworks are robust, their transformative potential is often blunted by weak enforcement and entrenched inequalities.

These challenges point to a broader issue; the same institutions tasked with addressing violence may also perpetuate it.

Beyond Outcomes: Process and Participation

Decolonial feminism also directs attention to process. It asks not only what legal instruments say, but how they are made. Who participates in norm creation? Whose knowledge counts?

This raises important questions for CEVAWG. To what extent were grassroots women’s movements involved in its development? How were diverse voices, particularly those of marginalized communities, incorporated? Without meaningful participation, even the most progressive legal frameworks risk reproducing the hierarchies they seek to dismantle.

Early indications suggest that CEVAWG includes provisions recognizing the role of civil society and community actors. However, the extent to which this reflects the actual process of its creation, and how it will shape implementation, remains an open question.

Finally, the question of implementation looms large. African regional instruments have often faced challenges related to ratification and enforcement. The success of CEVAWG will depend not only on its normative ambition, but on political will, institutional capacity, and sustained advocacy. Civil society organizations, regional bodies, and international partners will all play a role in translating its provisions into practice.

Conclusion: Rewriting Feminist Legal Authority

CEVAWG should not be understood simply as another treaty in the fight against gender-based violence. Its significance lies in its attempt to reconfigure the terms of that fight.

Through its expansive definition of violence (Arts. 1-3), its recognition of intersectionality (Arts. 7-9), its reworking of culture (Arts. 6, 10), its engagement with grassroots actors (Art. 11(2)), and its binding enforcement framework (Art. 14), the Convention both consolidates and reorients feminist legal norms.

At the same time, its reliance on state-centered and punitive approaches highlights the limits of legal reform in the absence of deeper structural change. 

The question, then, is not whether CEVAWG is necessary in a narrow legal sense. It is whether it can transform the way violence is understood, addressed, and governed.

In this respect, CEVAWG represents both an achievement and an invitation; an achievement in consolidating a regional framework on violence against women, and an invitation to rethink the epistemic foundations of global feminist law.

The success of this project will depend not only on ratification and implementation, but on whether it can sustain its decolonial promise — centering the voices, experiences, and knowledge systems of the women it seeks to protect.