Bhen the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan three years ago this month, one of their first acts was to paint over images of women on billboards and murals. Since then, women and girls have been erased themselves. Girls are not allowed to go to school, women are officially banned from most jobs, freedom of movement outside the home is severely restricted and often punished. Many of the women who have defied these restrictions have been tortured and imprisoned. Others live underground. The flogging and stoning of women in public has once again become a political measure.
Yet the world looks away. There are dedicated journalists and human rights activists who continue to report on Afghan women, girls and minorities, but the atrocities inflicted on them have long since disappeared from the front pages. Governments occasionally make statements of concern, but nothing more. It is only at moments like this, the third anniversary of the Taliban’s seizure of power, that we remember Afghanistan. For the rest of the year, Afghans are pushed out of sight and quietly left to their fate, as if nothing can be done.
But there is something that can be done: The Taliban can be held accountable. The militant group is responsible for some of the most serious violations of international criminal law. Just as the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and five senior government and military officials, it could do so for individual Taliban leaders. The ICC has jurisdiction because it is already investigating Afghanistan. The persecution of women and girls is a crime against humanity – one of the most serious categories of crime, along with genocide and war crimes. The prosecutor can prioritize investigations, gather evidence and apply for arrest warrants.
The Taliban can also be brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the “world court.” The ICJ decides cases brought between states. It is currently hearing major human rights cases, including cases involving torture, racial discrimination and genocide. As a group that controls Afghanistan, the Taliban can be brought to court to answer for their violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the main treaty protecting women’s rights, ratified by 189 countries. It is enough for one country to bring the case to court. The organization I lead, the Open Society Foundations, detailed how this can happen in a report published this year. We are at a time when, amid the many horrors around the world, dozens of countries are seeking justice in international courts for the most serious crimes, whether in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Syria or Myanmar. Afghanistan should be on that list too.
For the past three years, the international community has pursued a failed strategy of applying economic pressure on the one hand and seeking engagement on the other. Neither of these approaches has helped contain the Taliban, and both have worsened the situation of Afghan women and girls. The withdrawal of international aid and the imposition of sanctions have plunged the Afghan people into a deep humanitarian crisis. More than 23 million people, most of them women and girls, are in urgent need of assistance. And talks with the Taliban have focused on issues such as regional security and drugs, but never on the rights of women and girls. There are observers who point to positive aspects, saying that there is now peace in a country that has not known it for 40 years. But for half the population, the war continues, and they are the target.
Read more: The women of Afghanistan will no longer be silenced
By bringing the Taliban to The Hague, we can take a new approach – one that puts the rights of the Afghan people at the centre. The Taliban will not cooperate with either court, denouncing the proceedings as a conspiracy against them. But the courts’ decisions can set clear guidelines for how the international community deals with the Taliban and give their victims a voice. When I worked as a human rights investigator in post-conflict situations, including the Rwandan genocide, the women I spoke to didn’t just want their perpetrators punished. They wanted the crimes against them recognised, the truth about what happened to them revealed, and the future that was stolen from them given back.
For all their defiance, the Taliban are vulnerable to international pressure. They crave legitimacy for their regime. They want seats at the United Nations as Afghanistan’s representatives and diplomatic relations with the neighboring region and the rest of the world. Here, engagement is important, but it must be principled. You can work with the Taliban to the extent that it helps the Afghan people, especially in alleviating the humanitarian and economic crisis. But the rest is in the hands of the Taliban. They can start by keeping the promises they made to the world when they said they would not repeat the atrocities of their last reign.
There are also great dangers in not ensuring justice and allowing these brutal practices to become accepted. This creates a world of exceptions when it comes to women’s rights, where some are entitled to them and others are not, simply because of where they live.
Women’s rights in Afghanistan have never been an externally imposed project, as some claim, alien to the country. It has always been the women of Afghanistan who have fought for them, whether to enforce laws protecting women from violence under previous governments, or to resist the Taliban from exile, on the streets and even from their homes. We owe it to them to stand with them in this fight.
