Nigeria

Over the last decade, the state of LGBTIQ people’s human rights in Nigeria has deteriorated. In 2014, the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) was signed into law. The Act criminalizes same-sex marriage and displays of affection between people of the same sex, punishes “abetting” same-sex weddings or civil union ceremonies, and imposes a 10-year prison sentence on anyone who “registers, operates, or participates in gay clubs, societies, and organizations.” Nigerian LGBTIQ organizations, led by The Initiative for Equal Rights, successfully contested this latter provision in the High Court, but it remains to be seen if the Corporate Affairs Commission will register an openly LGBTIQ organization.

Same-sex intimacy was already illegal throughout the country under the Federal Criminal Code Act (2004) and the Penal Code (Northern States) Federal Provisions Act (1959). Twelve northern states in the country have adopted Shariah, punishing same-sex relations with death and criminalizing gender expressions that do not correspond with gender norms associated with the sex assigned at birth. In September 2025, the government of Kano State—a state in northern Nigeria that already criminalized homosexuality under Shariah in 2000 with death by stoning—proposed legislation to criminalize same-sex marriage, although such marriages are already prohibited under federal law.

In December 2024, the federal government introduced revised regulations through the Harmonised Armed Forces Terms and Conditions of Services prohibiting military personnel from engaging in “homosexuality, lesbianism, and bestiality” and “belonging to or engaging in activities of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual or Agender, Two-Spirit (LGBTQIA2S+) group and cross-dressing, amongst others.”

State officials conduct mass and arbitrary arrests, harassment, and extortion, which have heightened since the introduction of the SSMPA. Cases of harassment and violence at the hands of private individuals are common, including killings, kidnapping, mob violence, sexual violence, and coercive conversion practices. In northeast Nigeria, where armed conflict and mass displacement exist, LGBTIQ people face the harm experienced by all conflict-affected people. At the same time, however, they are less able to report gender-based violence and experience additional harms, including societal and familial exclusion and violence, brutality, and extortion by state actors. Government officials regularly make public comments denigrating “homosexual” people, contributing to Nigeria’s pervasively anti-queer sentiment.

Intersex people face a wide range of human rights abuses in Nigeria, including intersex genital mutilation, particularly in the larger cities. Abandonment of intersex children takes place, particularly in the country’s more rural areas.