Op-Ed by Homa Hoodfar, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, and Lauryn Oates, CW4WAfghan Executive Director
Published in the Ottawa Citizen, August 14, 2023
August 15th marks the grim anniversary of two years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. This 24 month period has been characterized by the rapid reversal of the rights and freedoms achieved by Afghan women and girls since the end of the first period of Taliban rule. Most recently, this was manifested with an extension of the existing ban on women’s education, as reports emerged of girls being banned from school beyond grade three in some areas of Afghanistan.
With each successive announcement of new edicts suppressing the rights of women and girls, the ruling Taliban — at the behest of Kandahar-based leader Haibatullah Akhundzada —are clawing their way back to the dystopian, theocratic and authoritarian society they imposed on the people, particularly women and girls of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Despite the naively hopeful if self-serving speculation from some quarters that the Taliban would be more moderate this time around, their ultimate goal has always been clearly advertised: a society from which women are erased. The world had the opportunity once before to witness the Taliban in power. From that experience and from their actions so far, we can safely assume there will be more, and worse, to come.
We shouldn’t need any more evidence that the Taliban envision a society where the subjugation of women and girls, and violence against them, is normalized. 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. Gender discrimination is not peripheral to their rule; in fact, it hinges upon it. There is a helpful and precisely descriptive term for this form of rule: gender apartheid.
In witnessing the situation of women in Afghanistan and Iran, defenders of women’s human rights, allied activists around the world, and international human rights lawyers are coalescing around the formal recognition of the crime of gender apartheid being one of the most viable tools that the international community has to pursue justice and accountability in the face of mounting violations of women’s human rights in Afghanistan – or anywhere.
Iranian women activists first used the term gender apartheid in the 1990s to describe the Islamic Republic of Iran’s legal system, which formally treated women’s lives and words as worth half as much as their male counterparts.
But while gender apartheid is an established concept and an apt term for the current situation in Afghanistan, there are steps needed to fully codify the crime of gender apartheid in international human rights and humanitarian law. Gender apartheid, like racial apartheid, must be recognized by the UN as an international crime, specifically a crime against humanity, and the UN must urgently adopt a comprehensive international framework that safeguards women and girls from institutionalized gender-based discrimination. This can give UN member states an impetus to take action, and it provides a stronger tool of advocacy for women’s human rights.
Concurrently, the development and adoption of a new UN convention that criminalizes gender apartheid policies should become a shared objective for the UN and its member states to more effectively respond to increased attacks on women’s rights internationally and ultimately, to the threat of gender apartheid. Meanwhile, UN member states can adopt their own proactive policies to exert pressure on the Taliban or any regime that uses systematic gender discrimination.
These are actions within our grasp that can make a meaningful difference in narrowing the gap between rhetoric and progress for women’s human rights. As human rights legal scholar Karima Bennoune has pointed out when discussing the importance of recognizing gender apartheid as a crime: “International pronouncements in favor of rights and equality without commensurate action discredit the women’s human rights project.” Gender apartheid is a crime that has been ignored for far too long, and the systemic inaction undermines the UN’s credibility and legitimacy.
Yet, as Bennoune points out, “discrimination against women remains, in practice, one of the most pervasive human rights violations around the world.” And nowhere is gender apartheid more plainly on display and perpetuated with such impunity as it is in Afghanistan, where women are paying with their bodies and their lives.
We must disrupt the apathy that has settled over the international community’s response to the most egregious remaining form of identity-based discrimination in the world today. It is our collective responsibility to show our commitment to our common humanity and values, and we can begin to do so through UN recognition of gender apartheid as an international crime against humanity.
Homa Hoodfar is a board member of Women Living Under Muslim Laws.
Lauryn Oates is executive director of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan
Link to original article: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/hoodfar-and-oates-un-must-recognize-gender-apartheid-in-afghanistan
