Political opposition to sexual and reproductive health services and LGBT rights is becoming well organised – and researchers argue that its targets are central to an autocratic reorganising of society, not simply ‘culture war’ casualties.
It has become customary for conservative member states to object to even cursory references to sexual and reproductive health (SRH), gender and sexual identity in United Nations (UN) documents – the latest example being the United States and Iran’s complaints about phrases in the UN pandemic declaration.
But these once knee-jerk objections have coalesced in a well-organised global campaign to curtail abortion and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.
The US has succeeded in recruiting 47 countries to join its anti-abortion campaign, the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD), which was launched by the first Trump administration in late 2020.
Trump 2.0 reassumed leadership of the GCD in August, driven by Bethany Kozma, the US Health and Human Services director of global affairs and former Trump 1.0 official Valerie Huber.
Kozma is known for far-right views, including that climate change is being used as “population control”. Huber established the Institute for Women’s Health to keep the GCD alive after Trump’s electoral defeat a few weeks after the GCD was launched, and has devoted herself to wooing First Ladies in conservative African countries.
Meanwhile, several countries have tightened anti-LGBT legislation, and last month a meeting of conservative diplomats and organisations on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly agreed to establish a “core group”, or informal caucus of UN member states to “counterbalance the influence of the UN LGBTI Core Group”.
Autocratic project, not ‘culture war’
For Central European University’s Professor Andrea Krizsan, excluding and “subordinating” women, girls and LGBT people isn’t simply a “culture war issue” – but a “fundamental part of the autocratic project”, in which the political community is reordered to create “hierarchies of citizenship”.
In 2024, autocracies surpassed democracies for the first time in 20 years, with 72% of the global population living under autocratic rule and only 12% living in liberal democracies, according to the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Germany.
Krizsan, a Hungarian academic with first-hand experience of such political reorganisation under former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, spoke at a recent conference at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
She identified three key tactics used to drive political reorganisation, starting with democratic manipulation. The anti-rights actors co-opt the language and institutions of democracy to establish a “hierarchy of rights” that undermines human rights and equality.
“They talk about rights of majorities, the rights of parents, the rights of the nation, rights of the foetus. They prioritise freedom of expression, academic and religious freedom over equality and human dignity,” Krizsan told the conference, “Resisting anti-gender ideology and feminist backlash”.
The second tactic involves “knowledge control”, which involves suppressing human rights initiatives, including eliminating university gender studies departments, curriculum changes, institutional restructuring, setting up new think tanks and data manipulation.
The third and final tactic is coercion, covering everything from violence to “ideological and legal harassment, criminalisation, impunity and state tolerance of attacks against activists, politicians, academics and civil society”, Krizsan explained.
‘Pure torture’ in Ghana
Several African countries have resorted to coercion against LGBT people. In late May, Ghana’s Parliament passed a harsh anti-LGBT law, the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, which outlaws LGBT identity as well as sexual activity.
The Bill “is a signal that queer identity is a public problem that institutions must handle”, said Solomon Atsuvia, a University of Pretoria doctoral student.
While conducting fieldwork in Ghana last year, Atsuvia uncovered instances where people suspected of being gay were assaulted, forced to fast for 21 days, isolated at their family home and made to pray on their knees for weeks on end.
One example involved Kwame (not his real name), a 28-year-old man from Accra, who told Atsuvia that his family took him to a prayer camp.
“For three nights, he was tied to a tree so, in his words, they could ‘burn the gay spirit out of him’. He was hungry, humiliated, and terrified. What they call deliverance was actually pure torture,” Atsuvia told the conference.
Ghana is championing the reorganisation of the global health architecture through the Accra Reset, which rests on the idea of African sovereignty over its health services and products.
However, the notion is also being used to evade internationally established human rights.
“In Ghana, LGBTQ+ rights are called a Western agenda. Churches are political players. The family is the basic unit of society, not the individual, and sovereignty is used against international scrutiny [of human rights violations],” said Atsuvia.
Asserting ‘sovereignty’ to protect FGM
Ghana is not the only country to assert national sovereignty to sidestep international human rights agreements.
Sierra Leone is using “sovereignty” to avoid outlawing female genital mutilation (FGM) despite international and regional norms and rulings declaring it to be torture and a human rights violation, according to Matilda Lasseko-Phooko from the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria.
Sierra Leone First Lady Fatima Maada Bio has refused to condemn FGM, and the practice is supported by a phalanx of national religious and cultural organisations, including the secretive Bondo and Poro societies that hold sway in the country’s politics.
In July 2025, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court of Justice found Sierra Leone’s government in violation of its fundamental duty to protect women and girls for failing to outlaw FGM.
The court declared the government in breach of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the Maputo Protocol and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and ordered it to take legislative and other appropriate measures to prohibit and prevent FGM.
But it is precisely these regional and international laws and conventions that conservative countries are trying to usurp using “sovereignty” as their defence.
“Sierra Leone has ratified relevant treaties without reservations but maintains that consenting adults may choose FGM. This position was reiterated during its 2026 Universal Periodic Review engagement,” said Lasseko-Phooko.
‘Against African culture’
For Kenyan human rights lawyer Tabitha Saoyo, the anti-rights campaign in Africa was initially driven by Western religious groups as a colonial project to convert Africans, using religious schools and universities to cement their values. However, it is now being driven by Western-educated Africans who aim to change Africa’s laws and policies by describing several rights as “against African culture”.
“Many of today’s anti-gender actors in Africa started with the conditioning that happened at the [Catholic] Strathmore schools [in Kenya] and similar schools across Africa,” said Saoyo.
The influential US and European anti-rights groups that used to initiate anti-rights action on the continent now act as “advisors” to their African proteges. Some have established offices on the continent, including alongside the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Family Watch International) and the African Court of Justice in Arusha, Tanzania (Ordo Iuris).
They have assisted in drafting the African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values, a conservative challenge to the Maputo Protocol, which commits countries to eliminating “all forms of discrimination against women”, including FGM and child marriage, and allowing abortion “in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest”, and when the pregnancy “endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the foetus”.
Conservative MPs across the continent want to put their charter to the AU for adoption as early as next year.
Conservatives want a “shift from rights-based governance to values-based regulation, where sovereignty, family, culture and religion are used to weaken substantive rights protections”, explained Sibongile Ndashe, executive director of the Institute for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA).
Several African countries, including Senegal, Burkina Faso, Uganda, and Ghana, have also introduced anti-LGBT laws as distractions as they face elections or economic challenges.
Sovereignty and the Geneva Consensus Declaration
Asserting national sovereignty is also one of the pillars of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which asserts that there is “no international right to abortion”.
While no international treaty explicitly establishes the right to abortion, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which came into force in 1981, sets out the right to reproductive choice and access to “family planning” services.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has also established that removing restrictions on abortion results in the reduction of maternal mortality.
The GCD’s 47 signatories include several authoritarian regimes with repressive policies towards women, girls and LGBT people.
Several GCD signatories allow, or turn a blind eye to, FGM, including the Gambia, Sudan, Djibouti and Egypt. At least 14 allow child brides, including Bahrain, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Iraq, Niger, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Senegal and parts of the United States.
Meanwhile, a group of NGOs calling itself the Global Coalition for Women’s Health, the Protection of Life, and the Family was launched on the sidelines of UNGA to support the Geneva Consensus Declaration and promote its aims across the UN.
The coalition is convened by four US conservative groups that have actively promoted anti-abortion, anti-LGBT measures globally: the Center for Family and Human Rights, Family Watch International, the Institute for Women’s Health, and the Heritage Foundation.
What is next?
Earlier this month, 52 nations supported a French statement to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) declaring that “the criminalization of consensual same-sex conduct is incompatible with the fundamental principles of international human rights law.”
However, UNGA recently elected a new 15-member UNHRC, including five countries that criminalise LGBT activity – Burundi, Ghana, Kuwait, Nigeria and Zambia.
Melanie Nathan, executive director of the African Human Rights Coalition, said it is “unconscionable that governments criminalising LGBTI people are entrusted with protecting human rights worldwide. A seat on this Council should demand accountability, not provide a cloak of legitimacy.”
Ipas, a global SRHR organisation, has documented the growing trend of UN member states “advancing anti-gender goals in the UN’s unexpected spaces”, noting that the number of UN member states attacking gender in these has grown to 15 times what it was in 2019.
It urges governments to train diplomats on gender equality and human rights, and how to respond to anti-gender tactics. It also advises feminist advocates to build broad partnerships with other social justice and human rights movements, and support government delegations to counter
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons, Lydia Gall/ Human Rights Watch, FGM/C Research Initiative, US HHS.
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