Arrest Warrants for Taliban, a Courageous Act in Defense of Afghan Women

Finally, something is moving at an institutional level in defense of Afghan women and their right to existence. Someone has noticed their unbearable daily suffering and, going beyond abstract declarations in defense of human rights, has exposed themselves with a concrete act.

The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has requested arrest warrants for the supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and for his Chief Judge, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, because they are responsible for the crime of gender persecution under Article 7(1) (h) of the Rome Statute. He considers them “criminally responsible for having persecuted Afghan girls and women, as well as persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming to their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women. This persecution has been committed since at least August 15, 2021, to the present day, throughout the territory of Afghanistan.” The ICC judges have three months to decide whether to accept the request of the prosecutor, who has also announced that he will request other arrest warrants for Taliban officials.

The ICC has made a historic decision, overcoming the hesitations and contradictory policies of the UN and of states that call themselves democratic because they formally refuse to recognize the Taliban government, but in the meantime invite its representatives to international conferences and do business with them.

In these three years of government, the Taliban and their faithful emissaries have promulgated and implemented countless decrees against women, girls and LGBTQ+ people, making them slaves segregated in their homes, without the right to go to school and work outside the home, to dress and move freely, even to sing, speak, pray out loud, completely hidden and separated even from other women, in their fundamentalist conception considered the source of all evil because they are women.

Given the absolute impermeability of the Taliban government to the injunctions of international institutions for the withdrawal of the measures and the restoration of women’s rights in exchange for their recognition, the response cannot be to erase the problem from political agendas and withdraw from the pressure to ingratiate themselves with the Taliban with trade concessions and economic aid, in the hope of convincing them to accept the rules of democracy in the future. Nor to bet on a division of the Taliban front in order to support its more moderate exponents.

There are no bad Taliban and good Taliban: they are all fundamentalists and their reason for being lies precisely in this ideology that unites them. In fact, during the twenty years of pro-Western governments, they have never dissolved or amalgamated with more flexible positions to find their space in politics and government. We cannot therefore count on their future assimilation, but only on their defeat.

We therefore applaud the ICC’s request for indictment, which publicly unmasks them for what they are: criminals who must be arrested and prosecuted as such, not politicians to be negotiated with.

The ICC’s path in this direction will be long and difficult, also because the Court must defend itself from attacks by those States that want to undermine its credibility and destroy it completely, but it is an act that makes it more difficult for the States that have adhered to the Rome Statute and the institution of the ICC to recognize the Taliban government.

Italy is also among these and we want it to stand up for the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.

For this reason, Cisda, within the Campaign against gender apartheid that it recently launched, proposes a petition addressed to the Italian government so that it, aware of its institutional role, takes responsibility for the defense of women’s rights at the competent international bodies.

We therefore ask that the Italian State:

– supports the request to include gender apartheid among international crimes in the Convention under discussion at the UN and in the revision of the Rome Statute

– joins the States that ask the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to call the Taliban to their responsibilities

– does not give recognition, neither legal nor de facto, to the Taliban regime.