NEWSLETTER | ISSUE 5 | ISLA CONVERSATIONS
Strengthening Access to Justice: A Strategic Blueprint For SOGIE Cases Before African Regional Mechanisms
May 2026
By Lakshita Kanhiya
In a moment where sexual rights are relentlessly policed, negotiated, and denied, ISLA’s sexual rights initiative refuses silence. Instead, it intervenes boldly and deliberately into the terrain of strategic litigation within the African human rights system. Through a series of charged and cross-movement convenings and consultations, litigators, activists, scholars, and defenders have come together not simply to reflect, but to reimagine power. Finalized in December 2025, the Blueprint on SOGIESC Litigation before the African Human Rights System is not just a document, it is a political tool. It marks a decisive pivot away from abstract commitments toward grounded, insurgent legal strategy.
It maps out how to engage institutions like the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights with intention and precision. It asks hard questions. Which cases matter? Whose stories are amplified? How do we build jurisprudence that does not merely exist, but transforms? It insists on coordination across movements, resourcing that matches the scale of struggle, and a politics of care that recognises the very real risks, legal, physical, and emotional borne by those who dare to litigate. In doing so, it translates years of feminist analysis into strategies that can be lived, used, and fought with.
The urgency of this intervention is impossible to ignore. When the African Commission revoked the observer status of the Coalition of African Lesbians under pressure from the African Union Executive Council, it exposed a truth many already knew, access to justice in regional spaces is not neutral. It is political. It is fragile. And it can be withdrawn. That moment was not just administrative, it was ideological. It was about who gets to exist within the frame of ‘human’ in human rights.
And that hostility is not incidental, it is organized. Anti-rights actors, often backed by transnational funding and networks, have sharpened their strategies within African Union spaces.
Meanwhile, feminist movements are forced to navigate shrinking civic space, where bureaucratic chokeholds, legal harassment, and reputational attacks are part of the terrain. Even regional mechanisms are not immune, law itself is being stretched, contested, and ideologically burdened.
At the national level, the pattern intensifies. In countries like Uganda, Ghana, and Senegal, regressive laws and policies signal not just backlash, but a coordinated attempt to roll back hard-won gains. This convergence of domestic repression and regional resistance reveals something critical; justice will not be handed over. It must be fought for, strategically and collectively.
This is where the Blueprint locates its power. It does not pretend the system is neutral, it equips us to navigate its contradictions. It recognizes that legal arguments alone are not enough, they must be accompanied by political clarity, movement alignment, and an unflinching commitment to those most at risk. It is feminist in its insistence on care, radical in its imagination, and strategic in its execution. Above all, it is a call to action, to litigate not just for recognition, but for transformation.