Maputo Article 4: The Rights to Life, Integrity and Security of the Person

Article 4 functions as the Maputo Protocol's central anti-violence engine. There's no single CEDAW article that does this much in one place; CEDAW's violence protections are scattered across General Recommendations issued decades after the treaty's text was finalized.

What it states

Paragraph 1 sets the baseline: every woman is entitled to respect for her life, integrity, and security, with all exploitation and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment prohibited outright.

Paragraph 2 then obligates states to eleven specific actions, including:

• Enact and enforce laws against all forms of violence, explicitly naming unwanted or forced sex, in both private and public settings

• Identify root causes of violence against women, not just punish incidents after the fact

• Actively promote peace education specifically to dismantle cultural beliefs and stereotypes that legitimize violence

• Punish perpetrators and fund rehabilitation programs for survivors

• Prevent and prosecute trafficking in women

• Prohibit medical or scientific experimentation on women without informed consent

• Fund the implementation and monitoring of anti-violence measures with dedicated budget

• Bar the death penalty from being carried out on pregnant or nursing women

• Guarantee women equal access to refugee status procedures, including retaining their own identity documents

Use as a vehicle for new protections

Three things stand out as genuinely novel relative to CEDAW. First, Article 4(2)(c) requires states to address causes, not just consequences. Second, Article 4(2)(d) is one of the only places in either treaty that explicitly targets cultural belief systems as a named driver of violence requiring active intervention through education, treating conditioning itself as something states are obligated to dismantle, not just the acts it produces. Third, Article 4(2)(k), equal access to refugee determination procedures with retained identity documents, addresses a vulnerability CEDAW's framework doesn't reach into at all: what happens to a woman's rights when she's displaced and stateless.

Reservations

Article 4 draws reservations from a few states. Notably, some states have entered reservations narrowing paragraph 2(j), the prohibition on executing pregnant or nursing women, where domestic death penalty law conflicts with the provision. This marks the shift the series will now track consistently: once a Maputo article requires concrete state action rather than declaring a general principle, reservations start appearing.