The Universal Periodic Review and the Ban on Intersex Genital Mutilation in an African Context

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) assesses the human rights records of all 193 UN Member States against the benchmark of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its core human rights treaties. To date, more than 100,000 recommendations have been provided to states under review (SUR) from peer Member States. Less than 1% address the rights of intersex persons. Western countries issue most of these cases, followed by the Latin American and Caribbean countries. African and Asian countries formulate a negligible number. This asymmetric data might mistakenly support the assumption that Western countries care more about the rights of intersex persons than non-Western countries. However, the recent groundbreaking Resolution on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Intersex Persons in Africa calls upon its states’ parties to stop nonconsensual genital normalisation practices on intersex persons and considers these practices as mutilation. Intersex genital mutilation (IGM) stands as a profound human rights infringement experienced by intersex individuals, who undergo medical interventions often performed on their healthy bodies. The primary objective of such interventions is to enforce conformity to prevailing medical and sociocultural norms pertaining to binary genders. I argue that Member States formulating recommendations advocating for the ban on IGM should consider contextualised factors, especially with regards to “informed consent”. This approach aims to enhance the persuasiveness of recommendations and increase the likelihood of their acceptance by SUR. Through the analysis of twenty-nine IGM-related UPR recommendations, this article addresses the effectiveness of the UPR in discussing intersex rights and the ban on IGM, with a focus on Africa.