Naming and Ending Gender Apartheid

Call for Solidarity and Action

Right to Learn Afghanistan, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Women’s Regional Network, Afghan Women Parliamentarians & Leaders Network, Women’s Advocacy Committee, and allied organizations and activists are calling for concerted action by the international community, through the UN system, to pursue justice and accountability for systemic, wide-scale and life-threatening discrimination and gender-based human rights abuses against women and girls in Afghanistan.

Every aspect of Afghan women’s lives are controlled and scrutinized through multiple edicts, decrees, instructions and rules designed to subjugate and erase women from the public sphere and public life. The Taliban’s gender ideology that views women as lesser beings without rights is at the heart of their policies. Their rule and political vision undermines peace and security in Afghanistan, throughout the region and globally.

There is by now undeniable evidence that Taliban envision a society where the subjugation of women and girls, and violence against them, is normalized, and their intent is to enforce their discriminatory rules through the use of terrifying violence, including torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances, sexual violence and executions. In fact, their regime amounts to rule rather centred on gender discrimination or, gender apartheid.

Gender apartheid, like racial apartheid, must be recognized as an international crime, specifically a crime against humanity. In the international legal system, there are currently established categories of violations that prohibit discrimination and persecution on the basis of sex and gender. Those existing statutes and conventions lay the foundational framework for an international convention to deter and criminalize the crime of gender apartheid. The existing conventions and standards on racial apartheid need to be directly applied to gender apartheid. To achieve this, we call for several specific actions listed in the statement and form at the button below.

We invite you to show your solidarity by signing the form if you agree with the statement and recommendations.