Maputo Protocol Article 1: Defining discrimination, harmful practices, and violence against women in Africa
Why Maputo, and why alongside CEDAW
CEDAW was adopted in 1979 as the international baseline. 189 countries have ratified it, making it one of the most widely adopted human rights treaties in existence. But a baseline built for near-universal ratification is, by necessity, a floor. It has to be general enough that vastly different legal systems, cultures, and governments can sign onto it without their specific circumstances derailing consensus.
The Maputo Protocol (formally the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa) was adopted by the African Union in 2003, entered into force in 2005, and exists precisely because that CEDAW floor wasn't enough. It's a regional instrument, binding only on the 44 AU member states that have ratified it, but within that scope it goes considerably further than CEDAW does. It explicitly names and defines violence against women in its own text (CEDAW never does. That protection was read in decades later through committee guidance, not the treaty itself). It's the first binding human rights instrument in the world to recognize abortion, under defined circumstances, as a woman's right. It addresses widows' rights, inheritance, harmful traditional practices including FGM, women in armed conflict, and the right to a healthy environment, none of which CEDAW's text reaches directly.
That's the throughline for this series: CEDAW sets the international floor; Maputo shows what a regional instrument looks like when it's built to go beyond that floor for a specific continent's realities; US domestic law shows what one country, bound by neither treaty in enforceable form, actually does in practice. Read together, the three tracks show the gap between what's internationally agreed, what's regionally achievable, and what's domestically enforced.
Two of the countries from my lived experience draw, South Africa and Zimbabwe, are both States Parties to Maputo, which is what makes it possible to bring the same lived-experience anchor to this series that CEDAW's US/UK/UAE/South Africa/Zimbabwe pieces have used.
Article 1: Defines discrimination, harmful practices, and violence against women for the entire Protocol
What it does
Article 1 builds the vocabulary the rest of the Protocol runs on. It's structurally similar to CEDAW's Article 1, which does the same single job; defining "discrimination against women". Maputo goes further, defining four additional terms CEDAW's Article 1 doesn't touch at all.
What it states
Article 1 defines eleven terms, but four carry the real weight:
Discrimination against women: any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or differential treatment based on sex that compromises women's enjoyment of human rights, regardless of marital status.
Harmful Practices: behaviors, attitudes, or practices that negatively affect women's and girls' fundamental rights: life, health, dignity, education, physical integrity. No exhaustive list here; the term is defined broadly so Article 5 can apply it to FGM and beyond.
Violence against women: explicitly covers physical, sexual, psychological, and economic harm, plus the threat of such acts, in both private and public life, and in peacetime and armed conflict. CEDAW never defines this term in its own text at all. It only entered CEDAW jurisprudence decades later through General Recommendations 12, 19, and 35.
Women: "persons of female gender, including girls." No qualifier on nationality, citizenship, or marital status.
Use as a vehicle for new protections
This is where Article 1 does more work than its CEDAW counterpart. By defining "violence against women" and "harmful practices" directly in the treaty's own definitions section, rather than leaving them to be read in later, Maputo makes violence and harmful practices textually foundational rather than interpretive add-ons. It means Articles 3, 4, and 5 (dignity, life/security, elimination of harmful practices) have a firm definitional anchor built into the treaty, instead of relying on a committee's evolving interpretation the way CEDAW's VAW protections do. Including economic harm within "violence against women" also broadly widens the term beyond how most domestic legal systems, including the US, still define it.
Reservations
None of the States Parties with reservations have entered any reservation against Article 1. That's consistent with the pattern across the treaty: definitions articles rarely draw reservations, because reservations attack obligations, not terminology. This means Article 1 pieces will consistently be reservation-light compared to the substantive articles ahead.