Before a single delegate arrives in Cape Town, the opposition is already organised. LGBTQIA+ organisations have written to President Cyril Ramaphosa asking him to stop the event, and a petition against it has gathered more than 11,000 signatures. The third Pan-African Conference on Family Values is scheduled for 12-15 May 2027. Its organisers describe it as a defence of “family values”, but the draft charter at its centre defines the family strictly as marriage between a man and a woman, with no recognition for same-sex couples.
For the general public, the stakes reach far beyond the communities most immediately targeted. The draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values is a proposed continental framework that would shape how African states legislate on family, marriage, and sexual health and reproductive rights. Family law governs marriage, divorce, property, inheritance and custody. Because it touches the most basic relationships in people’s lives, it shapes everyone’s ability to live safely, equally and free from discrimination.
That is why this debate should concern every citizen, not only LGBTQ+ people. Equality Now’s research across 20 African countries shows how family laws determine women’s rights to property and inheritance, their ability to leave a marriage on equal terms, and their rights and responsibilities towards their own children. These are not private or cultural questions. They affect economic justice, bodily autonomy, mental health, safety and equality for everyone a family law touches.
Meanwhile, the conference circuit behind the charter has been building for two years. It began in Nairobi in May 2025, where organisers adopted a declaration affirming the family as society’s “natural and fundamental” unit and calling for stronger legal protection of parental authority. The debate moved to Accra the following year, where delegates from more than 20 African countries endorsed the draft charter, and organisers said they intended to finalise it and submit it to the African Union. Both meetings framed a narrow, patriarchal model of family based on heterosexual marriage as something needing legal protection from outside interference. In practice, that framing becomes a tool for excluding anyone who falls outside it: a same-sex couple, an unmarried mother, a grandmother raising her grandchildren, or a woman seeking a divorce. Twenty of the countries at Accra endorsed the charter outright; South Africa and Mozambique did not.
South Africa’s refusal matters for the public it serves. At the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty in Accra in June, delegate Zandile Majozi informed the convening that the draft conflicted with Chapter 2 of the country’s Constitution. That constitutional model, with equality protections that apply regardless of sexual orientation and legal recognition for same-sex couples, is the opposite of what the charter proposes. Cape Town is where that model will be tested, in public, by the conference’s arrival.
By contrast, African states have already negotiated their own answer to these questions. The Maputo Protocol, formally the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, is the African Union’s own treaty on women’s rights. African governments adopted it in Maputo, Mozambique, in 2003, and 46 of the AU’s 55 member states, including South Africa, have since ratified it. It guarantees women equality in marriage and the family, protection from harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage, and the right to make their own decisions about their reproductive health. It is not a foreign import. It is one of the continent’s own human rights instruments, negotiated and adopted by African governments.
Yet the draft charter calls on states to withdraw from agreements that conflict with its principles, naming Maputo specifically. The language of sovereignty sits uneasily with a proposal asking African states to abandon a treaty their own governments built. Whether the 2027 conference in Cape Town strengthens that treaty or erodes it will shape family law, and everyday rights, across the continent for years to come.