The chief prosecutor of the Worldwide Legal Court docket mentioned Thursday that he has sought arrest warrants for the highest chief of Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities and the nation’s chief justice for his or her “unprecedented” persecution of Afghan girls and women.
Prosecutor Karim Khan mentioned in an announcement that Taliban chief Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada and Afghanistan’s Supreme Court docket chief Abdul Hakim Haqqani had dedicated a criminal offense in opposition to humanity: “gender-based persecution.”
“Afghan girls and women, in addition to the LGBTQI+ neighborhood, face unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban,” the assertion mentioned.
Since US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. and the Taliban regained energy, fundamentalist rulers issued more and more strict vice codes and advantage legal guidelines that banished girls completely from public life and from many personal actions.
The edicts, introduced as Muslim spiritual guidelines, bar girls from work and virtually all public locations. In 2023 the Taliban closed all beauty salons — one of many few public locations left within the nation the place girls can collect exterior the house. Afghanistan additionally banned women from highschool and ladies from college training, the one nation to take action.
A UN rapporteur described the acute regime as “gender apartheid.”
Many ladies have fled the nation and others are in search of methods to flee their closed way of life.
The prosecutor’s transfer is the primary authorized utility by the Hague-based courtroom to incorporate the plight of LGBTQI+ teams in a discrimination grievance. However this isn’t the primary worldwide authorized try to stress the Taliban to loosen up their grip on the lives of Afghan women.
Final yr Australia, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands took the Taliban to the International Court of Justicethe UN’s highest courtroom, and condemned them for “gross and systematic” violations of the UN conference, ratified by Afghanistan, which prohibits all types of discrimination in opposition to girls.
Different international locations have since joined the case, which has made its means via the World Court docket and is predicted to result in public hearings and presumably courtroom orders.
Though the Taliban have ignored worldwide stress to alter their extremist remedy of ladies, activists hope the group will make concessions because the nation’s leaders seek to normalize diplomatic relations or obtain international assistance. They are saying worldwide courtroom instances are necessary to maintain the plight of Afghan girls on the agenda.
“Afghan girls and women lastly have an opportunity to hunt justice for the atrocities they’ve suffered for the reason that Taliban took over,” mentioned Binayfer Nowroji, president of the Open Society Foundations, an impartial group working for justice, democratic governance and human rights. “With out the ICC and different worldwide tribunals, Afghan girls and women would have nowhere else to show to carry the Taliban accountable.”
Mr Khan’s request for warrants is a part of his wider investigation into alleged Taliban crimes. In his temporary, the prosecutor mentioned his workplace would search further warrants for different senior Taliban officers for large-scale assaults on Afghan civilians.
A 3-judge panel points ICC arrest warrants, a course of that may take months. Attorneys conversant in the courtroom mentioned these orders might seem extra rapidly as a result of the decrees discriminating in opposition to Afghan girls in violation of worldwide legislation had been overtly issued by Taliban rulers.
The Taliban chief is just not identified to have left the nation, so if the warrants are issued, the possibilities of them being executed are slim.
Mr Khan mentioned in an announcement that opposition to the Taliban had been “brutally suppressed” via “crimes together with homicide, imprisonment, torture, rape and different types of sexual violence, enforced disappearance and different inhumane acts”. He in contrast the oppression and violence to the Taliban’s earlier crimes after they had been beforehand in energy.
The ultraconservative fighters rose to prominence after the withdrawal of invading Soviet troops, capturing the capital Kabul in 1996. A coalition of worldwide forces led by america invaded in 2001, monitoring down Osama bin Laden, the chief of al-Qaeda. The bombing brought about the Taliban to retreat.
ICC investigations into crimes dedicated in Afghanistan first started in 2007. and for a very long time they had been within the background. They embody allegations of misconduct by US troops, together with extrajudicial killings and torture.
However Mr Khan shocked many when, quickly after taking workplace in 2021, he introduced he would “de-prioritise” the investigation into US personnel. He mentioned his resolution was primarily based on his want to make use of restricted assets effectively. This primarily delayed the American part of the investigation.
