Despite hosting the African Union (AU) Summit where the Convention to End Violence Against Women and Girls was adopted in February 2025, Ethiopia has not ratified the treaty, leaving one of the continent\u2019s most affected populations without the legal protections envisioned under the instrument.<\/p>\n
The contrast was noted during\u00a0 the two-day African Women in Media (AWiM25) Conference held at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa this week.<\/p>\n
Giving a keynote speech, Yemisi Akinbobola (PhD), head of AWiM, said that although the Convention was celebrated as Africa\u2019s first legally binding continental treaty dedicated solely to preventing and eliminating violence against women and girls, no African country has ratified it.<\/p>\n
\u201cZero have ratified it. Not a single African country has ratified that important document,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Adopted by the heads of state at the AU Summit, the Convention requires 15 member states to ratify before it can enter into force. Without ratification, it remains political symbolism rather than a binding legal commitment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout ratification, the Convention exists politically, symbolically, but not as an enforceable legal obligation of member states,\u201d said Akinbobola.<\/p>\n
Ethiopia is not among the seven countries that have signed the Convention. Those that have signed in principle are Angola, Burundi, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, The Gambia, and Ghana.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Conference participants who spoke to The Reporter<\/em> stated that Ethiopia\u2019s absence highlights a widening gap between the country\u2019s public rhetoric on women\u2019s rights and the continent\u2019s efforts to create uniform, enforceable standards against gender-based violence.<\/p>\n According to the AWiM keynote, the Convention fills major gaps left unaddressed by older instruments such as the Maputo Protocol, a human rights instrument adopted by the AU in 2003 to guarantee a comprehensive set of rights for women in Africa.<\/p>\n However, the eighth Convention to End Violence Against Women and Girls introduces recognition of intersecting vulnerabilities including disability, displacement, age, health and mandates accountability for perpetrators.<\/p>\n Its provisions also include prohibitions on workplace violence and harmful labour practices involving girls, obligations to prevent, investigate and prosecute femicide and enforcement of fair, non-discriminatory judiciary processes, fast-track mechanisms and victim\/witness protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Convention also addresses online and digital violence, a growing threat identified in recent research on the barriers facing Ethiopian women journalists.<\/p>\n The AWiM presentation also linked the Convention to the Kigali Declaration on the Elimination of Gender Violence, co-designed during AWiM 2023, which outlines minimum standards for addressing harassment, intimidation, unsafe work environments and online abuse faced by women in the media.\u00a0<\/p>\n The AU official urged the people of the countries which did not sign the convention to galvanize public pressure on the government to sign and ratify the Convention.<\/p>\n \u201cIf your country is not on that list, then I call on you to play your part in changing that,\u201d she said, emphasizing the role of media and citizens in pushing leaders to act on an issue affecting half of the population.<\/p>\n Akinbobola warned that without immediate action, Africa risks reversing decades of progress on women\u2019s rights, adding that activism should focus on converting political commitments into legal obligations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite hosting the African Union (AU) Summit where the Convention to End Violence Against Women and Girls was adopted in February 2025, Ethiopia has not ratified the treaty, leaving one of the continent\u2019s most affected populations without the legal protections envisioned under the instrument. The contrast was noted during\u00a0 the two-day African Women in Media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":48017,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"editor_plus_copied_stylings":"{}","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1960,13],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news-in-ethiopia","8":"category-latest-ethiopian-political-news"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}