The application by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for arrest warrants against two senior Taliban leaders has opened a window of hope for Afghan women and girls. On 23 January 2025, the ICC Prosecutor, Mr. Karim Khan, announced his request to the judges of the ICC to issue arrest warrants against the Supreme Leader of the Taliban Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds in Afghanistan affecting women and girls, as well as LGBTIQ persons. This action demonstrates that, despite the challenges, international mechanisms can actually be triggered in the search for global justice and accountability for grave and systematic violations of women’s rights and gender equality.

Since August 2021, the Taliban de facto government has issued more than 80 edicts restricting the rights and freedoms of Afghan women and girls in all spheres of their existence: public participation and political life, economic and social life, health and safety, and family and cultural life. Women described their experience saying, “We are alive, but not living”. The ‘Morality Law’ of August 2024 prohibits women from speaking in public on the grounds that the female voice should only be expressed in an intimate setting, and even prevents women from singing publicly.

The prohibitions issued by the Taliban also include discretionary powers to apply severe punishments for non-compliance, further heightening a social climate of fear and uncertainty. The intent to erase women’s and girls’ human rights to the extreme has also facilitated the reinforcement of harmful practices and gender stereotypes, as well as patriarchal conducts towards women and girls, including in some cases by their own family members.

This deprivation of fundamental rights of Afghan women and girls, and LGBTI persons, and harsh methods of enforcement, can be characterized as gender persecution, a crime against humanity already contemplated in Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute of the ICC and prosecutable by the ICC. The Prosecutor’s move has been welcomed by Afghan civil society organisations, as well as by UN human rights experts, as a positive step in the pursuit of justice for misogynistic policies and for past and ongoing gender-based crimes.

How does this help the movement to end gender apartheid?

Feminist campaigns, human rights organisations, UN human rights experts, renowned activists like Malala Yousafzai, and some States have defended that the system of institutionalized discrimination, segregation and subjugation of women and girls based on gender, also amounts to ‘gender apartheid’, and should be explicitly recognized and codified as such in international law. Defenders of this position argue that ‘gender apartheid’ builds on the legal figure of racial apartheid to fully capture the institutionalised and systematic nature of the inhumane acts being perpetrated in Afghanistan based on gender and would complement the existing crime against humanity of gender persecution. The UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee (Legal) is currently discussing the possibility of including gender apartheid in the draft Convention on Crimes Against Humanity and it will resume its analysis in its meeting of January 2026.

While the outrage over the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan is crucial, it is also essential to understand it not as an isolated event in a single country, but as a symptomatic situation – certainly one of the most serious – of the global gender backlash. As such, Afghanistan is a test for the international community, its founding values and its red lines: the reaction to this reality will point the path to take in the face of (potential) acts of gender oppression in other parts of the world.

One can only hope the ICC judges live up to the expectations of the Afghan people and issue the requested arrest warrants. This would place the dignity and human rights of women and girls at the centre of the international stage where they belong.