The worldwide prison court docket’s chief prosecutor stated on Thursday he was looking for arrest warrants in opposition to senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan over the persecution of girls, a criminal offense in opposition to humanity.
Karim Khan stated there have been affordable grounds to suspect that the Taliban’s supreme chief, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and the chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, “bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds”.
Khan stated that Afghan girls and women, in addition to the LGBTQ group, have been going through “an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban”.
He added: “Our action signals that the status quo for women and girls in Afghanistan is not acceptable.”
ICC judges will now contemplate Khan’s utility earlier than deciding whether or not to concern an arrest warrant – a course of that might take weeks and even months.
The court docket, based mostly in The Hague, was set as much as rule on the world’s worst crimes, akin to conflict crimes and crimes in opposition to humanity. It has no police drive of its personal and depends on its 125 member states to hold out its arrest warrants – with blended outcomes. In principle because of this anybody topic to an ICC arrest warrant can’t journey to a member state for concern of being detained.
Khan stated that he would quickly be looking for extra functions for different Taliban officers and famous that different crimes in opposition to humanity have been being dedicated in addition to persecution.
“Perceived resistance or opposition to the Taliban was, and is, brutally repressed through the commission of crimes including murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts,” he stated.
Human Rights Watch stated that the prosecutor’s actions ought to put the Taliban’s exclusion of girls and women from public life again on the worldwide group agenda. Liz Evenson, the organisation’s worldwide justice director, stated: “Three years after the Taliban retook power, their systematic violations of women and girls’ rights … have accelerated with complete impunity.”
After sweeping again to energy in August 2021, the Taliban authorities pledged a softer rule than their first stint in energy from 1996 to 2001. However they shortly imposed restrictions on girls and women that the United Nations has labelled “gender apartheid”.
Edicts in keeping with their interpretation of Islamic regulation handed down by Akhundzada, who guidelines by decree from the motion’s birthplace in southern Kandahar, have squeezed girls and women from public life.
The Taliban authorities barred women from secondary college and girls from college within the first 18 months after they ousted the US-backed authorities, making Afghanistan the one nation on this planet to impose such bans.
The authorities imposed restrictions on girls working for non-governmental teams and different employment, with hundreds of girls shedding authorities jobs – or being paid to remain at dwelling.
Magnificence salons have been closed and girls blocked from visiting public parks, gyms and baths in addition to travelling lengthy distances with out a male chaperone. A “vice and virtue” regulation introduced final summer season ordered girls to not sing or recite poetry in public and for his or her voices and our bodies to be “concealed” exterior the house.
The few remaining feminine TV presenters put on tight headscarves and face masks in keeping with a 2022 diktat by Akhundzada that ladies cowl up absolutely in public, together with their faces, ideally with a conventional burqa. Most just lately, girls have been suspended from attending well being institutes providing programs in midwifery and nursing, the place many had flocked after the college ban.
Rights teams and the worldwide group have condemned the restrictions, which stay a key sticking level within the Taliban authorities’ pursuit of official recognition, which it has not obtained from any state.
The Taliban authorities have persistently dismissed worldwide criticism of their insurance policies, saying all residents’ rights are offered for below Islamic regulation.
