Over the past three years, the world has watched in horror as women and girls in Afghanistan have had their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away.
In the face of inaction by the international community, a campaign for the conditions being imposed on Afghan and Iranian women to be made a crime under international law as gender apartheid was launched last year. What does the term mean and will it make a difference?
What does gender apartheid mean?
Gender apartheid is a term used to describe the systemic oppression, discrimination and segregation of a specific group based on gender.
Apartheid is defined as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.
Racial apartheid, which comes from the Afrikaans word for “separateness”, became a crime under international law in 1973 in response to the segregation and subjugation of black South Africans by the white ruling class in South Africa since 1948, and which continued until 1994.
Women’s rights activists, UN experts and lawyers argue that if you replace the word “racial” with “gender”, it becomes an accurate reflection of the condition of tens of millions of women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran.
What are activists calling for?
At the end of 2023, a campaign called End Gender Apartheid was launched by Afghan human rights activists, backed by United Nations experts, calling for gender apartheid in Afghanistan to be codified as a crime against humanity by the U
The campaign argues that current laws criminalising gender persecution do not reflect the intent, ideology and institutionalised nature of the systemic subjugation and deprivation of women in Afghanistan , where laws have been specifically crafted to constrain the lives of women and their role in society.
What is the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan?
Women and their status and rights have been pivotal to the Taliban’s governance of Afghanistan since it swept to power in August 2021, after the withdrawal of US and UK troops and the collapse of the democratic Afghan government.
In the past three years, the group has issued more than 80 edicts curtailing the rights of all Afghanistan’s women and girls.
The Taliban have stopped girls from attending secondary school and university, banned women from almost every form of paid employment, prevented them from walking in public parks, attending gyms or beauty salons and blocked their access to the legal system.
In August, they published a new set of “vice and virtue” laws, which banned women from speaking in public, deeming their voices an “intimate” part of their bodies, and made it mandatory for women to cover every part of their body in thick cloth in public. It also made it illegal for women to look at a man who is not a relation.
The Taliban have also brought back flogging and the stoning and public execution of women for offences such as adultery.
What about calls for this also to apply to Iran?
Some human rights activists are also arguing that the term gender apartheid should also be applied to what is happening to women in Iran.
They argue that Iran’s new “hijab and chastity” bill imposes harsh penalties, including prison sentences of up to 10 years, on women who do not conform to a mandated dress code and head covering in public.
It also increases the surveillance of women and girls by the government to ensure they are conforming to the hijab regulations, using CCTV cameras on public transport and government-mandated “hijab watchers” and imposes more gender segregation in public spaces. An aggressive enforcement crackdown by the Iranian regime has seen women shot in their cars, dragged from the streets, tortured and imprisoned after being deemed to be in breach of strict hijab laws
The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran has called the law a form of gender apartheid, and said “authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission”
However, others argue that the situation for women in Iran is not comparable to the plight of women in Afghanistan and while the Iranian authorities are undeniably imposing human rights abuses and severe gender discrimination on women and girls, it does not equate to gender apartheid.
Could making gender apartheid a crime against humanity make a difference?
Those calling for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime against humanity argue that the international community responded to racial apartheid in South Africa after it became a crime in 1973,eventually forcing the government to back down.
If gender apartheid was codified as a crime and applied to Afghanistan or Iran, states would theoretically be obliged to take action, to uphold the integrity of international laws. It would also increase pressure on countries to grant asylum to Afghan and Iranian women and girls and hopefully stop states from accepting the legitimacy of Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan and pursuing trade and diplomatic relations with them.
In September, Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands said it was planning to take the Taliban to the international court of justice (ICJ) for gender discrimination, which could strengthen the calls to codify gender apartheid under international law.
However, others argue that making gender apartheid a crime would have limited impact.
When it comes to Afghanistan, while activists push for sanctions and isolation of the Taliban, the international community has largely followed a policy of conditional engagement and there are signs that countries in the region are slowly building diplomatic bridges with the regime.
So far, no condemnation, sanctions or pressure from the international community has had any impact on the Taliban or the relentless oppression of women and girls in Iran and there is no prospect of governments engaging militarily in Afghanistan or Iran to protect their rights.
As one Afghan woman told the Guardian earlier this year: “Nobody is coming to help us.”
