Free women everywhere

Forced by over a hundred prohibitions and reckless measures to remain locked and hidden in their homes, without any opportunity to participate in social life, Afghan women today, after nearly four years of Taliban rule, are living in increasingly unbearable conditions.

Women and girls are reduced to domestic slavery, deprived of every fundamental right and freedom: they cannot study, they cannot leave the house alone, they cannot make their voices heard in public or show their faces, they are denied healthcare in the absence of female doctors, they are killed for demonstrating for their rights and stoned to death if deemed adulterous. 2.2 million girls have been deprived of secondary education, over 100,000 young women have been expelled from universities. A recent measure also closed midwifery and health care schools, the last remaining option for girls to pursue a profession and for women giving birth to children to receive assistance.

The health of all Afghan women is at serious risk, especially if they are alone: ​​they can only be cared for by women and cannot go to the hospital without a man accompanying them. Women are prohibited from any work outside the home, even in a female-only environment such as hairdressing. Even working for national and international NGOs is prohibited, and the profession of journalism, one of the few professions still permitted, is increasingly being clamped down upon.

Women are now prohibited from doing anything, even if it is reserved for them: access to parks, public restrooms, and bars, playing sports, or traveling without a male guardian. Their bodies must be completely covered, including their hands. In October 2024, the Taliban went further, promulgating a law prohibiting women from speaking to each other in public; their voices must not be heard by other women, even during prayers. Finally, they demanded the closure of all windows in homes that overlooked areas frequented by women.

The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice enforces these rules with strict surveillance, under penalty of beatings or arrest, even for fathers or husbands. Women are terrified by the arrests and conditions of confinement. When they are taken to police stations, especially protesting women, they are stripped and photographed, with the threat of their photos being made public, thus compromising their reputation and that of their families. Simply spending a night in a police station exposes them to rejection and reprisals from their families.

Public floggings have resumed, often on charges of adultery, but any rebellion against their husbands or attempts to make independent choices is considered such.

Despair is profound, and some, no longer able to tolerate injustice, have taken their own lives. Since the return of the Taliban, the UN has recorded at least 150 suicides of women forced into early marriages.

Resistance

Afghan women have never stopped courageously resisting. Initially, they protested in the streets or at home, using the internet to film themselves, but now it’s very dangerous. To maintain hope and fight back, they continually seek new ways to circumvent the law, study secretly and read together at home and online, invent businesses and jobs to feed their families, ways to earn a living through women-led projects, and, last but not least, they continue to beautify themselves under the burqa. Essentially, they remain alive despite all attempts to annihilate them.

This complete suppression of the most basic human rights of women and LGBTQI+ individuals is not simply due to malice or random excesses: it is the fruit of a Taliban vision that sees discrimination against women as a cornerstone of their rule, a deliberate attempt to translate a fundamentalist idea into a system of governance. Its primary objective is the systematic and institutional annihilation of women, viewed as the source of all evil, according to their interpretation of Sharia law.

This is why we speak of true Gender Apartheid (GAA) when referring to the Taliban regime, because this is the precise definition of the crime perpetrated by the Taliban. But this crime does not yet officially exist; it is not on the list of international crimes defined by the Treaty of Rome, which allows the International Criminal Court (ICC) to initiate criminal proceedings. And there is still no convention recognized by all UN states to which the Court of International Justice (ICJ) can appeal to condemn this crime.

Therefore CISDA (Italian Coordination for the Support of Afghan Women), joining the more general movement that wants to fight ADG in Afghanistan and in the world, launched the Stop Gender Apartheid – Stop Fundamentalism Campaign several months ago. The campaign calls for Gender Apartheid to be included as a new and specific crime within the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Humanity, currently being prepared by the UN Sixth Committee. It has submitted its own definition of Gender Apartheid, which takes into account not only women’s rights but also LGBTQI+ people, as part of the contributions that civil society has also been invited to submit.

Similarly, a request has been made for Gender Apartheid to be included within the Rome Statute, which will be redefined in the coming months.

In Italy

The Campaign also directly challenges the Italian government with a petition (already signed by more than two thousand people and eighty associations) urging Italy to adopt actions consistent with the international conventions and treaties signed to protect women’s fundamental rights and freedoms. Specifically, it is requested that:

• support the inclusion of Gender Apartheid in the proposed Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Humanity currently being prepared by the UN
• denounce the gender apartheid currently in place in Afghanistan and therefore not recognize the legitimacy, either legal or de facto, of the Taliban government
• prevent the Taliban from exercising political power in international forums
• support Afghan civil society associations that are not compromised by the Taliban and the warlords.

Finally, join the more than 20 countries that have referred Afghanistan to the ICC for numerous violations of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women – a treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979) and join the seven states that have urged the ICC to investigate the serious crimes of the Taliban, supporting their calls for indictment.

The complaints to international tribunals are important steps not because we believe that a conviction of the Taliban would be enough to make them change – if they renounced their ideology, they would cease to exist – but a conviction would make it clear that the policy of recognizing the Taliban government that all states are pursuing goes against the principles of protection of human rights and women’s rights ratified by international conventions. It would therefore restore justice and strength to the struggles and resistance of Afghan women.

Because we must not forget that, to defend the rights of women, of all women in the world, we must defeat fundamentalism, in Afghanistan, in Iran, and everywhere. Therefore, we cannot reach an agreement with the Taliban, as the UN itself did at the Doha Conference last May, when it accepted their conditions, which excluded any openness to the rights of Afghan women. This diplomatic commitment to their conditions is becoming “the new normal.”

But this is not the help Afghan women, the girls on whose skin this normality passes, are asking for. They are asking for a coherent fight against fundamentalism!

This is why the campaign to recognize the ADG as a crime against humanity and to condemn the Taliban government is so valuable. It puts a brake on political attempts to accept that reactionary and fundamentalist government as inevitable, forgetting the suffering of women.

The article was published in Mosaico di Pace, October 2025