Afghan women fight to hold Taliban to account over gender apartheid

When Sima Samar and other Afghan women came up with the term “gender apartheid” in the 1990s to describe the systematic oppression faced by women and girls under Taliban rule, she never imagined it would have become a key weapon in the fight to hold a second Taliban regime to account for their crimes two decades later.

“When the first Taliban regime fell, the idea that we would once again see the persecution, isolation and segregational and systematic repression of half the Afghan population on the basis of their gender seemed impossible,” says Samar, who served as the minister for women’s affairs after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and now lives in exile. “But now, in 2024, it is happening again and this time we must find a way to fight for justice.”

At the end of 2023, a campaign for gender apartheid in Afghanistan to be recognised and codified by the UN as a crime against humanity was launched, part of a desperate attempt by Afghan women living outside the country to get the international community to stop the new regime’s assault on women and girls.

“ Racial apartheid is a crime against humanity under international law since 1973. Swap the word ‘racial’ for ‘gender’ and this is what is happening to Afghan women and girls,” says Samar.

Since they took power in August 2021, the Taliban have issued more than 80 edicts restricting the lives of women and girls. They have prevented girls from going to secondary school, barred women from nearly all forms of paid employment, from accessing the justice system or walking in public parks.

They have stipulated that women must be completely covered at all times outside the house and that their voices must not be heard in public. Women can now be stoned to death for crimes such as adultery.

“No action or condemnation by the international community has done anything to stop the assault on women’s rights,” says Samar. “So it has come down to Afghan women to act.”

It is becoming easy for policymakers and international decision makers to ignore Afghan women in exile

Mariam Safi, activist

Yet as the voices of women and girls inside Afghanistan have been largely silenced, female activists living in exile, who have been calling for action to end the impunity of the Taliban regime, say they have found themselves increasingly dismissed in international policymaking and diplomatic circles as not accurately representing the reality of life for Afghan women.

“We are finding that it is becoming easy for policymakers and international decision makers to ignore Afghan women in exile who are saying things that run contrary to what they want to hear,” says Mariam Safi, founder and director of the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies (Drops).

“What is harder to ignore is data and evidence of the impact of the Taliban’s rule on women inside Afghanistan, so this is what we’re focusing on trying to get,” she adds.

Safi’s Bishnaw project , a digital platform that gathers data from thousands of Afghan women from across the country through telephone surveys and face-to-face interviews, joins other initiatives launched by Afghans living in exile, who are trying to provide key evidence to support their attempts to get the Taliban’s policies recognised as crimes against humanity.

As well as the campaign to get gender apartheid codified under international law, Safi says her data is helping to inform other attempts to hold the Taliban accountable through the international criminal court and the international court of justice.

In January, the Bishnaw project asked more than 3,600 women from 19 provinces across Afghanistan whether they believed they were living under a system of gender apartheid.

Of the women who took part, the survey found that 67% agreed the restrictions they lived under amounted to “systemic oppression” of women and girls. When asked if they wanted the UN to use the term “gender apartheid” to describe their situation, 60% agreed.

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Another survey found that 83% of 2,100 women said they had been negatively affected by the Taliban’s ban on women being allowed to distribute humanitarian aid. One on child marriage found that 69% of women said they knew a girl who had been married at “an inappropriate age” since the Taliban took power.

Activists are becoming increasingly optimistic that the UN will recognise gender apartheid in Afghanistan in the coming weeks, as the general assembly continues.

Although there is also doubt over what this will ultimately achieve – and whether it might have a negative impact in areas such as levels of aid to Afghanistan – Samar sees it as a crucial recognition and first step towards concrete action.

“We need to criminalise what is happening so the Taliban’s actions cannot be dismissed or explained away as something cultural or religious. Condemnation is not enough: this needs to be on the law books; there needs to be an end to impunity.”