‘Taliban’s treatment of women is crime against humanity’

The Taliban swept back into power two years ago this month, as western forces and diplomats hastily withdrew…reports Asian Lite News

Former prime minister Gordon Brown has called on the International Criminal Court to prosecute the Taliban for crimes against humanity over the “systematic brutalisation of women and girls” in Afghanistan

Brown also urged the UK government and its allies to impose sanctions on regime officials responsible for the near-total exclusion of women and girls from education and the workplace.

The Taliban swept back into power two years ago this month, as western forces and diplomats hastily withdrew.

Their initial promises of a more moderate rule than that between 1996 and 2001, during which they were unrecognised by most of the outside world, has proved hollow.

The triumph of hardliners within the Taliban movement meant girls were excluded first from secondary school then from all education. Women were barred from working for aid organisations, prompting most to suspend operations there.

The Taliban had already insisted on segregated aid distributions, so without female workers Afghan women could no longer be helped. Last month there was a rare protest by Afghan women in Kabul after the Taliban decreed that beauty salons, one of the last public spaces open to women, be closed as “un-Islamic”.

Brown, the United Nations’ special envoy for global education, said the evidence of crimes against humanity being committed by the Taliban since their return to power was “overwhelming”.

“They’ve been excluded from education, excluded from employment, excluded from visiting public places,” he told the BBC. “It’s probably the most heinous, the most vicious, the most comprehensive abuse of human rights that’s taking place around the world today. And it is systematically being inflicted on millions of girls and women across Afghanistan. And that’s why the United Nations and others are calling it gender discrimination. Some call it gender apartheid. That’s why it’s seen as a crime against humanity — and it’s right, then, for the international criminal court, which has responsibility for dealing with crimes against humanity, to both investigate and to prosecute those people who have been responsible for this crime.”

Brown voiced support for sanctions against the Taliban as an entity, which have not been imposed since the takeover. “What we need is a prosecution,” he said. “But we also need sanctions. I’m urging the UK government to sanction the individuals responsible for this policy. The European Union has done it, but America and others can do it.”

Only financial sanctions relating to some Taliban leaders have remained in force since 1999. A 2021 resolution by the UN security council allowed for the provision of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without breaking international law on sanctions.

Brown said he was shocked that there is “so little international pressure on the regime”, suggesting that the pressure of a potential prosecution could force the Taliban to rethink its approach. He also urged leaders and clerics from Muslim-majority countries to help persuade the Taliban that “Islam is a religion that values women and girls” and denounce the misuse of Islam as a means to deny them rights.

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