On June 18, the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, presented a mandated report to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. The report states that the “phenomenon of an institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion of women and girls,” is Gender Apartheid. The report also brought to light the numerous human rights violations being committed against women and girls in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
In the report, Bennett makes it clear — the Taliban is currently engaging in Gender Apartheid. The term Gender Apartheid, which presently has no definition in the Rome Statute (the treaty granting power to the International Criminal Court), is defined by the report as “the institutionalized and systematized nature of the exclusion of and discrimination against women and girls…apartheid regimes enshrine and enforce a complex system of governance–of laws, policies, and practices–to systematically oppress and dominate a subset of society over the course of decades and generations.”
The labeling of the human rights abuses against women as a Gender Apartheid by the U.N. Special Rapporteur demonstrate the severity of the treatment Afghan women face every day. It also aims to highlight the duty of states to intervene and take action in the protection of Afghan women — much like the international community did during the South African racial apartheid — rather than normalizing the rule of the Taliban.
The Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan consists of a multitude of policies and practices that flagrantly deny women and girls human rights protected by international treaties. The Taliban, while not recognized as the official governing body of Afghanistan, still has a duty to uphold the obligations laid out in the many human rights treaties that Afghanistan is party to.
While the Taliban’s actions and policies against women and girls violate many human rights treaties, their human rights abuses are most evident in the face of the U.N. Resolution 1325, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which Afghanistan ratified in 2003. This treaty echoes human rights ratified in other U.N. documents, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) or the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
The report by Special Rapporteur Bennett highlighted four rights being violated in Afghanistan as a part of the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid policies: the right to education, the right to work, freedom of movement, and the right to health. These four rights covered in the report only scratch the surface of the current human rights situation in Afghanistan, and while they are listed separately, the document notes explicitly, “This report illustrates how these deprivations do not exist independently of each other. Rather, each deprivation systematically informs and interacts with the other(s), creating a complex convergence of oppression.”
International Humanitarian Law is just one way to change the treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan; however, it requires that the international community also begins to hold the Taliban accountable for their Gender Apartheid. The first step towards this is the continued non-recognition of the Taliban and the denormalization of their rule. Actions like the upcoming third meeting in Doha with the Taliban only serve to grant the Taliban and their actions against women legitimacy by the international community, especially when the Taliban bars women from these meetings.
Source: UN Special Rapporteur’s report
