Africa and the Architecture of Anti-LGBTQ Persecution – The Ghana Charter

By Melanie Nathan, August 13, 2026.

There is a tendency to report Africa's expanding anti-LGBTQ laws one country at a time.

Uganda passes a brutal law. Ghana advances another. Senegal increases its penalties. Burkina Faso criminalizes same-sex relations. Niger follows. Mali follows.

Each becomes a headline for a day or two. Then the world moves on. I cannot look at these developments that way.

For years, my work through African Human Rights Coalition and as a country-conditions expert in LGBTQ asylum cases has placed me at the other end of these laws. I see what happens after the parliamentary speeches are over, after politicians have invoked morality, religion, sovereignty and "family values," and after the international press has moved to the next story. All the while funding shrinks. Protection environments are compromised. Pathways diminish.

People still run.

They go into hiding. They are thrown out of family homes. They lose employment. They abandon businesses. They move from one neighborhood to another. They cross borders with almost nothing. Some sleep wherever another LGBTQ person will allow them to stay. Some attempt to reach countries that are scarcely safer than those they have fled, in fact hostile. Some begin asylum journeys that can consume years of their lives, with no guarantees for solutions.

And increasingly I am asking a disturbing question:

Where exactly are they supposed to go amidst this one of the World’s least known horrors.

Ghana is no longer an isolated story

Ghana is an important place to begin because what is happening there illustrates something much larger than one country's debate over homosexuality.

On May 29, 2026, Ghana's Parliament again passed its Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill. The legislation goes far beyond criminalizing same-sex intimacy. It criminalizes identity. Merely “holding out” as LGBTQI+ is a crime. It reaches advocacy, funding, sponsorship and what the government may determine constitutes the "promotion" of LGBTQ activity. It also creates reporting obligations that risk turning neighbors, family members, teachers, religious leaders and others into potential agents of enforcement.

And then Ghana became the venue for something potentially even more consequential. While the Bill is still pending presidential attestation, and mere days later, parliamentarians and other participants from across Africa gathered in Accra for the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family, Sovereignty and Values. The conference advanced an African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values, a document seeking to translate the rhetoric we have been hearing for years into something approaching a continental political program. This language promoted in Africa by U.S. Christian Evangelicals – at a very high dollar investment rate – is finally yielding its return. An estimated $50+ million dollars later.

Now this similar language begins appearing across borders, with politicians from multiple countries gathering together to discuss how laws should be structured.  Once LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, sex education and gender are packaged together as supposed threats to "African sovereignty," and although weaponized politically for votes, we are no longer dealing solely with independent domestic political developments.

We are watching an ideology organize itself, across the continent.

Recent reporting in The Week describes the expanding pattern of anti-LGBTQ legislation across Africa. The individual developments are important. But through the lens of the country-conditions research I conduct, I see something additional. I see contagion.

Not homosexuality. The persecution of homosexuality. Not the export of homosexuality, but the export of homophobia. The re-colonization of African turf through human sexuality and gender identity. 

Museveni told us what the ambition was

There was a moment in Uganda that deserves to be remembered. When signing the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act, in 2023, once dubbed “Thee Kill The Gays Bill,” President Yoweri Museveni called upon African leaders to "save the world from homosexuality."

It would have been easy at the time to dismiss such rhetoric as another outrageous statement from a politician who has spent decades demonizing LGBTQ people. I did not. Because I saw then how the rhetoric from a head of state together with legislation served as a catalyst to justify violence against the LGBTQI+ community in Uganda, the panic, and the flight it caused.

Uganda’s draconian anti-LGBTQI+  law provides life imprisonment for certain same-sex conduct and permits the death penalty for the statutory offense of "aggravated homosexuality," which among its parameters includes so called “serial offenders.” Does that mean one intimate act more than the last one?

But something else was happening. Uganda was not merely legislating for Uganda. It was presenting itself as part of a larger ideological struggle. The first African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty was held in Uganda in 2023. Subsequent gatherings continued there. In 2026, the conference moved to Ghana. What a coincidence – so did the legislation.

Now lawmakers from numerous African countries are discussing common principles and legislative approaches.  In other words, Museveni's call for Africa to "save the world" from homosexuality should perhaps be understood less as an eccentric outburst and more as a declaration of political and ideological intent, designed to pressure more nations: poised for  “Are you with us to combat the UN-AFRICAN or not?”

I have watched the map change

Country-conditions work forces me to pay attention to changes that can easily disappear inside the daily news cycle. For years we described many African anti-sodomy provisions as remnants of colonial penal codes. That history remains enormously important. Britain, Portugal, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France exported laws criminalizing same-sex conduct across much of their empires.

But describing today's crisis entirely as a colonial inheritance is no longer sufficient. Some governments are not merely retaining old laws. They are deliberately creating new ones. Robust one’s that broaden the old “Acts against the Order of nature” or “Carnal Knowledge” language into identity, going to the heart of sexuality and all its spectrums. 

Uganda dramatically escalated its criminal regime in 2023. Mali criminalized same-sex relations. Burkina Faso criminalized same-sex conduct. Niger, which had not previously criminalized consensual same-sex relations in this manner, has now done so. Senegal, where homosexuality was already criminalized, increased the potential punishment and expanded the reach of the law to include "promotion." Ghana has sought to move far beyond its existing colonial-era provision by constructing an entire legal architecture around LGBTQ identity, advocacy, association and support. Kenya is seeking similar.

When a government actively revisits homosexuality for the purpose of increasing punishment, expanding criminal liability or encouraging enforcement, it sends a message far beyond the statutory text: It licenses police to look, especially in countries where corruption can make a gay hunt a lucrative endeavor. It tells families that their rejection is validated, and that social death through banishment with violence is a fair way to deal with a queer son or daughter. It tells religious leaders that denunciation carries governmental authority. It tells landlords whom they may evict. It tells mobs whom society has designated as dangerous, that their attacks are for the greater good!  It tells blackmailers that their victims cannot safely seek police protection. And it tells LGBTQ people something even more immediate: You have been identified by your government as a problem to be punished, harshly.

The law does not have to be enforced against everyone to persecute everyone

One misconception repeatedly appears when discussing LGBTQ country conditions. People ask how many prosecutions there have been. Of course enforcement data matters. I examine arrests, prosecutions, detention and convictions in my work. But prosecution statistics alone cannot measure persecution.

• A gay man does not need to be standing inside a prison cell before the law has affected his life.

• A lesbian who knows her family can expose her may conceal every relationship she has and even succumb to a forced marriage, tantamount to regular rape.

• A transgender woman who fears police arrest may stop seeking healthcare.

• A young gay man expelled from his family home may lose housing, education and the entire social network upon which survival depends. 

• An activist may shut down an organization.

• A person living with HIV may stop visiting a clinic because being seen entering a service associated with LGBTQ communities can itself create danger.

• Someone attacked by neighbors may decide that reporting the assault to police carries a greater risk than remaining silent.

These are not theoretical possibilities- they are profoundly regular occurrences and I have barely mentioned the half of it.

They are precisely the kinds of facts that appear repeatedly in asylum declarations, expert reports and humanitarian requests. The law creates permission. Sometimes formal permission for state action. Sometimes social permission for everyone else.

And then comes flight

This is the part of the story I believe receives far too little attention. What happens when persecution succeeds? People looks for paths out – to leave. Unfortunately  human-rights discussions frequently stop at unfriendly borders – with countries capable of making a difference turning their backs and embracing the hostility.

African Human Rights Coalition works with LGBTQ people in forced displacement, including people who have crossed borders believing that simply leaving the country of persecution will produce safety. Often it does not. Someone fleeing Uganda may enter Kenya. Someone fleeing Senegal may try neighboring Gambia. Someone fleeing one West African country may discover that the next country also criminalizes them. That the Government charged with assigning their refugee status closes the door on them despite their international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol. And worse may detain them in squalid conditions for months at a time before deportation / refoulement back to their offending home country.

Refugees can spend years in legal limbo. They may have no work authorization, no stable housing and no meaningful pathway to resettlement.

Some hide their sexual orientation even from other refugees because refugee communities can reproduce exactly the religious, cultural and social hostility from which they fled.

An LGBTQ refugee therefore may experience two entirely different forms of exile simultaneously:

Exile from the country of nationality and exile within the refugee community itself.

That is one of the most misunderstood realities of LGBTQ displacement. A refugee camp is not automatically a refuge. A country subject to the Convention may choose to reject the LGBTQI+ refugee.

A neighboring African country is not automatically a safe third country. Crossing an international border does not magically erase homophobia. Sometimes it merely changes its address.

The safe spaces are shrinking

This becomes particularly alarming when one looks at the African map cumulatively. Imagine telling an LGBTQ person fleeing persecution simply to relocate somewhere else on the continent. Where? That question cannot be answered with geography alone. Does the neighboring country criminalize same-sex intimacy? Does it criminalize advocacy? Can police arrest someone on suspicion? Are LGBTQ organizations legally able to function? Can a refugee obtain documentation? Can that person work? Can they safely obtain healthcare? Can they rent housing without family connections? Will the host country's refugee system recognize persecution based upon sexual orientation or gender identity? Is there meaningful protection from private actors? And perhaps most importantly: if the country of refuge itself becomes increasingly hostile to LGBTQ people, how durable is that refuge?

This is why the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ legislation cannot be viewed solely as a civil-rights problem inside individual countries.

It is becoming a forced-displacement problem for the entire region.

The bitter irony of "Western influence"

There is another contradiction that deserves scrutiny. Anti-LGBTQ movements in Africa frequently describe homosexuality as a Western import. LGBTQ rights are characterized as foreign ideology. Politicians invoke sovereignty. Religious leaders describe themselves as defending African civilization from Western cultural imperialism. Yet the history is far more complicated. Many of the laws criminalizing homosexuality were themselves inherited from European colonial rule. And today, international conservative organizations and religious networks have participated in the very African "family values" movement that presents itself as resistance to foreign influence.

That does not mean Africans have no agency or that African homophobia can simply be blamed on outsiders. That argument would itself deny African political responsibility. African presidents sign these laws. African parliamentarians vote for them. African religious leaders promote them. African police enforce them. African families sometimes expel their own children. Responsibility belongs where actions occur.

But we should at least recognize the extraordinary contradiction in presenting LGBTQ equality as foreign contamination while participating in transnational movements dedicated to defeating it. There is nothing uniquely African about homosexuality. The is nothing uniquely European or American about homosexuality. And there is nothing uniquely African about homophobia either.

Both exist everywhere.

The world is creating refugees and simultaneously closing the doors

Perhaps this is what troubles me most. We are watching governments create the conditions that force LGBTQ people to flee at precisely the moment when the international refugee protection system is under extraordinary strain. Funding for humanitarian operations has contracted.

Resettlement opportunities remain tiny compared with global need. Western governments increasingly speak the language of deterrence. Borders are hardening. Third-country removal policies are expanding. And refugee agencies are being asked to accomplish more with dramatically fewer resources. So consider the sequence.

A government criminalizes you. Your family rejects you. Your community exposes you. You flee. The neighboring country also criminalizes you. You cannot qualify for a VISA nor do you have the funds to leave the Continent.

You seek protection from an international refugee system without sufficient money, shelter or resettlement places.

And wealthy countries thousands of miles away increasingly tell refugees that they should have remained somewhere closer to home. Closer to which home? That is the question.

If an ideological campaign succeeds in creating an expanding belt of countries in which LGBTQ people are criminalized, stigmatized or unable to live safely, regional flight ceases to offer a meaningful solution.

This is what the Ghana development means to me

I therefore look at what happened in Ghana in June this year (2026) -  differently from someone simply reading another headline about another anti-gay law. I see Ghana. But I also see Uganda. I see Senegal. I see Burkina Faso. I see Niger. I see Mali. I see Nigeria.  I see Mauritania. I see Kenya. I see Burundi. I see Zambia. I see the people already contacting organizations like ours.

I see asylum seekers whose declarations I read. I see refugees stranded in countries they thought would protect them. I see young people asking questions for which there are fewer and fewer good answers. And I see politicians congratulating themselves for defending "family" while creating the conditions that tear actual families apart.

There is an enormous human distance between passing a law in an air-conditioned parliament and running across a border carrying everything you still own. My work happens in that distance.

That is why the Ghana conference and its charter concern me so deeply. A national anti-LGBTQ law is dangerous. A political movement encouraging countries to reproduce those laws is something larger.

It begins to construct a regional architecture of persecution. Museveni once called upon Africa to save the world from homosexuality.

Now the Ghana Conference produced: The African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values, adopted at the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty, held in Accra, Ghana, June 3–6, 2026.

I implore -  what values? One’s that poke the violence that leads to flight for thousands?

Reuters reported that lawmakers from 18 of the 20 countries represented approved the 32-page Charter. (There are 54 African Countries)

I fear we are watching the movement continue to take form, not because homosexuality is spreading, but because governments have discovered how politically expedient it can be to organize against it. And while parliamentarians debate sovereignty, morality and values, LGBTQ Africans are left confronting a much simpler and much more desperate question: If I cannot live safely here, where am I supposed to go?

For far too many, the world has no adequate answer.

I would like to add one final note from our perspective at African Human Rights Coalition. Much of our hope continues to rest in the extraordinary work of UNHCR’s dedicated protection and resettlement teams, and the many officers and colleagues working with refugees and asylum seekers. Without that agency, and without the resilience of its staff working under increasingly harsh, underfunded and politically difficult circumstances—many LGBTQI+ refugees would have nowhere at all to turn. For countless people in forced displacement, UNHCR remains the thin line between abandonment and the possibility of protection.

If this article has moved you to action, and you are asking what you can do, please know that even the smallest contribution can make a difference. Please consider supporting UNHCR and/or African Human Rights Coalition. These are not abstract crises. Behind every law, every border crossing and every asylum claim is a human being trying to survive, find safety and rebuild a life. AFRICAN HUMAN RIGHTS COALITION DONATE HERE.

UNHCR DONATE HERE

Press Statement from Executive Director , of the African Human Rights Coalition, Melanie Nathan: “The African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values emerging from the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference is profoundly dangerous because it seeks to transform persecution from a series of national policies into a coordinated continental agenda. By wrapping the targeting of LGBTQI+ people in the language of family, culture, sovereignty and African values, it seeks to provide political legitimacy for governments to criminalize identity, restrict advocacy, silence civil society and resist international human-rights protections. From the perspective of African Human Rights Coalition, the consequences are dire: These laws and policies drive people from their families and homes, force them across borders, increase the number of LGBTQI+ Africans seeking protection, and simultaneously shrink the number of places on the continent where they can realistically find safety. What is being advanced as a defense of ‘family values’ risks becoming an architecture of persecution and forced displacement. From a human-rights perspective, this translates into a profound attempt at the erasure of LGBTQI+ people, not merely by criminalizing conduct and identity, but by denying people the most basic right to live openly and authentically in accordance with their sexual orientation or gender identity. It seeks to strip away fundamental freedoms of dignity, privacy, expression, association, family life, bodily autonomy and equality before the law. When a state declares an entire category of people incompatible with its proclaimed norms/ values, the harm extends far beyond prosecution: it legitimizes exclusion, silence, forced concealment, family rejection, social expulsion and ultimately flight. That is why this Charter must be understood not simply as a political or cultural statement, but as a direct threat to the most basic human rights and freedoms of LGBTQI+ Africans."