The totality of the over 100 chilling edicts targeting women and girls passed by the Taliban since August 2021 constitutes a crime yet to be named. No other country in the world denies the fundamental guarantee of education to half its population. No other country suspends due process for half its population by banning women access to justice.
During World War II, Winston Churchill called the mass killings of innocents “a crime without a name.” Raphael Lemkin responded by coining the word “genocide.”
Once again, we must name a crime that “strikes at our consciousness and our common humanity.”
At the heart of the Taliban’s campaign of gender apartheid are the over 100 edicts and laws issued by high-level Taliban authorities, including the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. An August 2024 law issued by the Taliban’s Supreme Leader entitled the “Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” a 114-page law that prohibits a wide range of conduct that effectively erases women.
This architecture includes March 2024 announcement by the Taliban’s Supreme Leader that the Taliban will enforce public flogging and stoning to death of women for violations of the Taliban’s misogynist interpretation of Sharia law, particularly for adultery.
In 2024, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee adopted GR 40, a new international normative principle addressing systematic oppression of women and girls. Paragraph 11 of the general recommendation refers to an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination of women, committed with the intention of maintaining a regime that is increasingly referred to as “gender apartheid.”
In February of 2026, the Committee adopted what is now being referred to as a landmark addendum to GR 30—on WPS. I was honored to draft it.
Paragraph 80:
In July 2025, the ICC issued warrants of arrest against leaders of the Taliban, representing the first time that the Prosecutor has charged the crime of gender persecution on its own. The ICC maintains that “…there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that [there exists a crime against humanity under Article 7(1)(h) of the RS] of persecution on the basis of gender…, targeting not only women and girls but also those perceived as their allies…”. This opens the door for gender persecution as a stand-alone charge in the fight against impunity. To create full accountability for gender-based crimes, the codification of the crime of “gender apartheid” is crucial.
While war is still waged on women’s bodies, as Raphael Lemkin once said, war is not carried out by arms alone.
The addendum also raises for the first time, a new form of violence: educational violence.
The addendum highlights: “The deliberate, widespread and systemic denial of girls’ and women’s education on gender grounds and may amount to violations of IHL. Conflict-related educational violence as a systemic form of gender discrimination may be tantamount to a crime against humanity, specifically persecution on gender grounds.”
The deliberate exclusion of women and girls from education and erasure of women in the public sphere pushes us to reimagine that women’s bodies are not the only battlegrounds—women’s minds are battlegrounds as well.
In the wake of the ban on girls and women’s education in places like Afghanistan, I ask: What is it about a girl with a book that so frightens a man with a gun? It is because women’s education is a vaccine against any kind of misogyny.
The deliberate exclusion of women and girls from education and erasure of women in the public sphere pushes us to reimagine that women’s bodies are not the only battlegrounds—women’s minds are battlegrounds as well.
Educational access also includes peace education. “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed” is the foundational premise of the UNESCO Constitution.
The denial of education and intellectual aspirations of half of Afghanistan cannot be condoned as part of religious ideology. We need to avoid falling into the trap of cultural relativism that somehow some women in some places because of some cultural differences have different standards of justice, including unequal rights for women. That is an intellectual conceit we need to avoid.
Can we see culture as heterogeneous and internally contested rather than primordial entities? Can we challenge the concept that culture is immutable, stable, true, even absolute? Norms that discriminate against women are most often legitimated at the altar of culture, religion and tradition.
Although the ICCPR and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guaranteed the right to hold religious beliefs and practice a religion of their choosing, international law permits states to impose limits on the practice of religion which “are necessary to protect … the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.” Therefore, “restrictions may be imposed on religious law and practice if they are necessary to protect women’s human rights and fundamental freedoms …”
In its General Comment No. 28, the Human Rights Committee determined that “[a]rticle 18 [guaranteeing freedom of religion or belief] may not be relied upon to justify discrimination against women…”
Article 13(2) of the ICESCR establishes the right to receive an education, which must be established on the basis of non-discrimination under Article 2(2), which obliges states to guarantee such rights outlined in the Covenant to “be exercised without discrimination of any kind.” The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ General Comment No. 13 affirms that “[e]ducation is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights.”
The CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendation No. 36 on education notably sees education as a legally justiciable right:
“Recognize rights in education as legally enforceable and that, upon the violation of those rights, girls and women have equal and effective access to justice and the right to remedies, including reparation.”
The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ General Comment No. 13 affirms that “[e]ducation is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights.” Education is “an empowerment right” that “has a vital role in empowering women.”
CEDAW’s General Recommendation 36 sees the right to education as “legally enforceable.” Together with ICESCR General Recommendation 13, it defines education as an “empowerment right.”
Using Treaties
CEDAW, CRC, CRPD and ICCPR Optional Protocol (OP) allow for individual complaints, once domestic procedures have been exhausted unless the application of such remedies is unreasonably prolonged or unlikely to bring effective relief.
Afghanistan has not ratified the OP for CERD or CEDAW but has ratified the OP of the CRPD. It enables the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to receive individual complaints of rights violations and conduct inquiries into grave or systematic abuse by state parties.
The patterns of systemic exclusion of women with disabilities from employment and economic livelihoods may rise to the level of a violation of International Humanitarian Law. The Taliban’s system of governance strategically dismantles existing disability support systems, and the structural disabilities violate the rights of PWDs, especially PWD women, under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
A Survivor-Centric Approach to Justice
This week, we come before the international community to reclaim women’s access to justice. No group of women have been denied access to justice the way the women of Afghanistan have.
While a survivor-centric and trauma-informed approach to transitional justice must provide reparations that address material, and moral damages in sexual violence in conflict, transformative reparations must go beyond individual redress to address the structural inequalities and the preservation of historical memory.
The Addendum reinvigorates a survivor-centric and trauma-informed approach to justice both in international and domestic tribunals.
Article 68 of the Rome Statute to take “appropriate measures to protect the safety, physical and psychological well-being, dignity and privacy of victims and witnesses.”
How do we honor Afghan women’s direct participation in the justice system as chief protagonists of justice? A “survivor-centered approach” is needed in investigation and prosecution of gender-based crimes, Afghan women’s meaningful participation is critical to ensuring the legitimacy of all accountability efforts in the eyes of the international community and the Afghan people.
The Office of the ICC Prosecutor has stressed “the importance of collaboration” with civil society, including by engaging with civil society and victims’ groups to “identify[] and gather[] information” on gender-based crimes and “identify[] victims and witnesses.” And that “[n]etworks are crucial for effective investigations” and expressed a desire to “identify appropriate individuals … as intermediaries to support investigations.”
How can evidentiary rules give survivors increased agency in criminal proceedings; and how can rules of evidence be interpreted in a way to address the risk of re-traumatization; and adopt a survivor-informed justice system.
What are the practices that can allow survivors to tell their stories in court?
In Prosecutor v. Lubanga, the court held that anonymous victims may participate in proceedings, reasoned that, “the Chamber is also conscious of the particularly vulnerable position of many of these victims, who live in an area of ongoing conflict where it is difficult to ensure their safety.” The Rome Statute explicitly grants survivors the right to participate at certain stages of the investigation proceedings.
Bringing litigation against the perpetrators also required survivors to break decades of silence about their traumas. One of the clearest lessons learned is the comprehensive and sustained psychosocial support of civil society organizations to the success of cases on GBV.
Several domestic cases that have adjudicated international crimes are important reminders. The Sepur Zarco case in Guatemala is a case in point. The civil society organization that represented the women engaged the women extensively in decision-making throughout the Sepur Zarco case.
Even before the case was filed, the women organized and decided what would be included in the case. A trauma-sensitive interpretation of rules that govern rules of procedure will help survivors share their stories. Importantly, using prerecorded testimony of the survivors is a protective measure that serves to reduce the risk of re-traumatization in a number of ways. By taking the survivors’ testimony in pretrial hearings and permitting those recordings to be used at trial, the survivors can tell their stories without significant interruptions, particularly by the defense.
The voices of Afghan women in civil society are not merely testimonies; they are primary sources and primary experts on the oppression they face.
