Afghanistan’s ‘gender apartheid’ should be international crime: UN expert

Geneva, Switzerland (AFP):

The UN’s top expert on rights in Afghanistan has urged countries to consider making “gender apartheid” an international crime, helping hold the Taliban accountable for the exclusion of women from education, progress and development.

Shortly after ousting a foreign-backed government in August 2021, the Taliban authorities barred girls from secondary school, pushing women out of government jobs, preventing them from travelling without a male relative and ordered adherence to a prescribed dress code.

“It is imperative that we do not look away,” Richard Bennett told the UN Human Rights Council.

Presenting his latest report, the UN special rapporteur on the situation in Afghanistan told the council that the Taliban’s actions could constitute the crime against humanity of “gender persecution”.

In addition, “grave, systematic and institutionalised 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”, he said.

Such “serious human rights violations, which although not yet an explicit international crime, requires further study,” he insisted.

Bennett’s report — drafted jointly with the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls — called on countries to “mandate a report on gender apartheid as an institutionalised system of discrimination, segregation, humiliation and exclusion of women and girls”.