A United Nations expert said on Monday that the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women and girls could amount to gender apartheid as their rights continue to be gravely infringed by the country’s de facto authorities.
The U.N. defines gender apartheid as “economic and social sexual discrimination against individuals because of their gender or sex.”
The Taliban seized power in August 2021, drastically curtailing women’s freedoms and rights, including their ability to attend high school and university.
In a report covering July to December 2022, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, found in March that the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls “may amount to gender persecution, a crime against humanity”.
“Grave, systematic and institutionalized discrimination against women and girls is at the heart of Taliban ideology and rule, which also gives rise to concerns that they may be responsible for gender apartheid, a serious human rights violation, which although not yet explicitly an international crime, requires further study,” Bennett said.
“We have more specifically outlined issues of gender persecutions in the report and we have pointed to the need for more exploration of gender apartheid, which is not currently an international crime, but could become so and we have noted that it appears if one applies the definition of apartheid, which at the moment is for race, to the situation in Afghanistan and use sex instead of race, then there seem to be strong indications pointing towards that,” he added.
“We also draw to the Council’s attention our deep concern that these serious deprivations of women’s and girls’ fundamental human rights and the harsh enforcement by the de facto authorities of their restrictive measures may constitute the crime against humanity of gender persecution,” Bennett said.
In April, Taliban authorities also began enforcing a ban on Afghan women working for the U.N. after stopping women from working for aid groups in December.
The Taliban authorities say they respect women’s rights in accordance with their strict interpretation of Islamic law.
