Africa & West Asia

Representation 

One of the clearest trends to have emerged in the first six months of 2024 is that of attacks on opposition parties. Some of the most extreme examples include blanket bans on some political parties and coalitions imposed by the governments of Mali and Cameroon, respectively. The military regime in Gabon looks set to follow suit, after a national conference in April recommended the suspension of all political parties pending new regulations. The deaths of Bate Urgessa in Ethiopia and Yaya Dillo Djerou in Chad, both allegedly at the hands of state security forces, also highlighted the vulnerability of opposition politicians in these countries to physical attack. In Chad and in Zimbabwe, the courts have played a role in restricting political party freedom, with judiciaries controversially excluding opposition candidates from competing in key national elections and paving the way for incumbent wins.

Rights  

The region also experienced several significant advances and declines in LGBTQIA+ and women’s rights in the first half of the year. The parliaments of Ghana and Iraq passed highly restrictive anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation that prescribe heavy prison sentences for same sex relations, being transgender and promoting homosexuality, thereby shrinking civic space for advocacy and support work. The constitutionality of the Ghanaian bill, which has not yet been signed into law, is being challenged in the country’s Supreme Court. In June, Namibia’s high court overturned two colonial-era laws criminalising same-sex conduct, ruling that they unfairly discriminated against gay men and were therefore unconstitutional. The case was brought by a prominent Namibian LGBTQIA+ activist. Attitudes towards homosexuality vary across Africa and tolerance levels in Namibia and the southern Africa region more broadly are amongst the highest on the continent.

Gender equality continued to be undermined in Iran, where the police assaulted women and girls in a violent new hijab enforcement campaign in April. There was a potential setback, too, in Somalia, where a constitutional amendment setting the ‘age of maturity’ at 15 is predicted to perpetuate high levels of child marriage, particularly for girls. In contrast, Sierra Leone’s parliament passed legislation outlawing this practice. Women’s political representation was given a boost in the Democratic Republic of Congo, when President Félix Tshisekedi appointed the country’s first female prime minister, Judith Suminwa Tuluka.          

Rule of Law 

The impact of armed conflicts on the rule of law and rights is another area of concern for the region. Warnings from UN experts that genocide is being committed in Gaza and that it may have been committed in Darfur and the massacre of over two hundred civilians by the army in Burkina Faso, underscore the gravity of the breaches of Personal Integrity and Security and the threats the conflicts pose to Social Group Equality. Freedom of Movement has also been significantly impacted, with large scale displacement a feature of the wars in Gaza and Sudan, as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique, and the Amhara region of Ethiopia, where clashes between the government and ethnic militia have also prompted an extension of a state of emergency restricting people’s movement. The conflicts have also coincided with growing restrictions on Freedom of the Press, with operations or access to foreign media outlets suspended in Israel, Sudan and Burkina Faso. The repression of pro-Palestinian protests in Jordan highlighted how the effects of armed conflict on Civil Liberties are being felt beyond the borders of war-torn countries.   

Participation 

There were 10 national elections in Africa and Western Asia in the first half of the 2024 election supercycle, of which five were presidential and five parliamentary. The average voter turnout was 57.37 per cent. Turnout for Iran’s parliamentary elections and the first round of its Presidential election was particularly low (just 40 per cent in both), reflecting pervasive disenchantment with the country’s political system. In the countries that held parliamentary elections, average female representation declined from 18.46 to 16.97 per cent and none of the presidential elections returned a woman president -notwithstanding the appointment of new female prime minister in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Only Senegal’s presidential election resulted in a transfer of power, with Bassirou Diomaye Faye of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity succeeding Macky Sall of the Alliance for the Republic. The election was also notable for the resilience shown by Senegal’s courts, electoral commission and civil society, which ensured a peaceful transition amidst a constitutional crisis that threatened to destabilise its democracy. In South Africa’s general elections, the long-governing African National Congress party lost its absolute majority, resulting in the formation of the first national coalition government since 1994.