18 February 2024 marked a historic day for the African continent with the adoption at the 37th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on Specific Aspects of the Right to a Nationality and the Eradication of Statelessness in Africa (the Protocol), offering millions of people - probably - the hope of finally existing and no longer being invisible in the eyes of laws and governments.
The adoption of this Protocol reaffirmed Africa's commitment to ensuring both the promotion, protection and respect of the right to a nationality of every individual, a fundamental condition for the protection and effective exercise of all other human rights, and the prevention and eradication of statelessness, which violates the right to respect for the inherent dignity of the human person and to recognition as a person before the law.
Adopting the Protocol would also give concrete expression to the principle of ‘African solutions to African problems’, since the Protocol addresses specific African nationality issues and provides appropriate responses, such as transgenerational statelessness, nomadic and cross-border populations, and procedural guarantees for the right to nationality.
However, today, 18 February 2025, one year after the adoption of the Protocol, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (the Commission) deplores the fact that this instrument has still not been signed or ratified.
This is all the more worrying given that, despite the many notable advances made in some African States that have adopted or amended their nationality legislation to eradicate statelessness, certain bad practices still persist in other States, such as the forfeiture of nationality for political reasons, the lack of development of birth registration systems, and discriminatory nationality laws and policies that often prevent women from passing on their nationality to their children or spouses, leaving entire families without a legal identity and exposing them to serious risks of human rights violations.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights wishes to take the opportunity of this first anniversary of the adoption of the Protocol on the Specific Aspects of the Right to a Nationality and the Eradication of Statelessness in Africa to remind African States of the importance of ratifying the texts they adopt in order to make them “living texts” so that they can really have a positive impact on the lives of all Africans.
On this day of commemoration, the African Commission encourages all States Parties to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights to speed up the process of ratifying the Protocol, so that it can enter into force as soon as possible, by achieving fifteen ratifications.
In this context, it recalls the commitments already made in this area at the level of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), in particular through the Abidjan Declaration of 25 February 2015 on the eradication of statelessness in West Africa adopted within the framework of the Economic Communitý of West African States (ECOWAS), but also the Brazzaville Declaration on the eradication of statelessness of 16 October 2017 taken by the Member States of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR).
The African Commission also reiterates its appeals to the AU Commission, the UNHCR, civil society organisations and all other partners to provide their support and contribution in order to conduct genuine collaborative advocacy in the campaign for the ratification of this Protocol to enable not only its entry into force but also to achieve universal ratification, thereby enabling the achievement of the African Union's Agenda 2063, in particular the aspirations of the African peoples to African citizenshiṕ, but also the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the aim of which is to ‘leave no one behind’.
Finally, the entry into force of the Protocol on specific aspects of the right to a nationality and the eradication of statelessness in Africa will represent a significant participation of Africa in the new Global Alliance to End Statelessness, which was officially launched in October 2024, and thus an implementation of aspiration 7 of Agenda 2063 to make Africa a major partner in global affairs.
18 February 2025
Honourable Commissioner Selma SASSI-SAFER
Special Rapporteur on Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Internally Displaced Persons and Migrants in Africa
