The Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced this Thursday that it has asked judges to issue arrest warrants against the supreme leader of the Taliban, Haibatullah Akhundzadá, and the president of the Supreme Court of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”, Abdul Hakim Haqqani. Chief prosecutor Karim Khan believes there are reasonable grounds to hold them “criminally responsible for the crime against humanity of gender-based persecution.” The events that support this accusation have occurred at least since August 15, 2021, when fundamentalists returned to power in Afghanistan, and refer especially to the persecution of Afghan girls and women, who have been deprived of their most basic rights. basics: education, work and even the possibility of speaking in public. The accusation also refers to violence committed against people who the Taliban consider “who did not conform to their ideological expectations of gender identity and expression.”
The authorization of these orders is the responsibility of the court judges, who will be the ones to decide whether or not to accept the prosecutor’s request. These are the first arrest requests related to Afghanistan since the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber authorized the Prosecutor’s Office in October 2022 to resume investigations into a case that dates back to 2007 but which was paralyzed until then.
In his application, Karim Khan recalls that his research work has benefited from the contributions “of our dedicated Afghanistan Unified Team,” and multiple experts. Based on the evidence gathered, the Prosecutor’s Office has come to the conclusion that the constant persecution for which it considers Ajundzadá and Haqqani responsible in the first place, “entails numerous serious deprivations of the fundamental rights of the victims.”
It is also contrary to international law, “including the right to physical integrity and autonomy, free movement and expression, education, private and family life and freedom of assembly.” The prosecutor thus summarizes the deprivations and prohibitions imposed on Afghan women, “and on people whom the Taliban considered allies of girls and women.” And it warns that the Taliban’s interpretation of sharia – Islamic religious law – “should not and cannot be used to justify the deprivation of fundamental human rights or the commission of related crimes contemplated in the Rome Statute,” the legal text. foundation of the court, which is the backbone of its work.
The Prosecutor’s Office also focuses on the situation of those who apparently resist or oppose the Taliban, who “was and is brutally repressed,” through “the commission of crimes that include murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, forced disappearance and other inhuman acts.” The arrest requests are based on testimonies of experts and witnesses, study of audiovisual material, public statements of the suspects themselves as well as official decrees of the Taliban, among others. In its letter to the judges, the Prosecutor’s Office emphasizes that “both Afghan women and girls and the LGBTQI+ community face unprecedented, unacceptable and continuous persecution by the Taliban.” And prosecutor Khan personally recognizes in his text addressed to the judges “the extraordinary courage and resistance of the Afghan victims and witnesses,” who have cooperated in the investigations.
A hundred edicts
On August 23, the Afghan rulers ratified a morality law that definitively sentenced the erasure of women from the public sphere and that deprivation of rights that Richard Bennett, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, defined in June as gender-based apartheid in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. This rule includes the prohibition of Afghan women from speaking in public spaces and from showing their faces, which, from that day on, they have to cover completely. Women and girls in the Central Asian country cannot even look at men who are not very close relatives.
Afghan women are prohibited from studying from the age of 12 and working in the Administration, security forces, banks, NGOs and the United Nations. They are also not authorized to obtain a passport or travel without the company of a close male relative. Leisure is also prohibited to them. In addition to the general prohibition on listening to music, Afghan women can no longer enter parks, gardens or gyms. Nor go to hair salons—also closed by the Taliban—or public bathrooms. Five out of ten Afghans do not have access to basic sanitation facilities, according to Unicef data. For many women and girls, these baths were the only way to wash with hot water and have proper menstrual hygiene.
The persecution of Afghan women reached a new peak on December 2 when Ajundzadá signed a decree to prohibit women from training in health professions. The consequences of that decision go far beyond the already serious consequence of depriving Afghan women of one of the last remaining pockets of study and work. Without doctors, dentists, midwives or nurses, many women will be deprived of medical care, given that, in several provinces of the country, male health workers are prohibited from treating them.
Like that decree, the rest of the more than a hundred edicts that have suppressed women’s rights – adopted by the Taliban since they came to power in August 2021 – also come from the supreme leader of the Afghan fundamentalists, whose arrest they now demand Khan.
For his part, the president of the Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, whose arrest the ICC Prosecutor’s Office also aspires to, is considered an ultra-conservative, completely aligned with the dictates of the supreme leader, and whose performance in office is considered decisive to justify and legalize the misogynistic policies dictated by Ajundzadá against Afghan women and girls. Haqqani was already sanctioned for this reason in July 2023 by the European Union.
At the end of November, Spain – along with France, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica – sent a report to the ICC prosecutor, in which it asked him to include in his investigation into Afghanistan the crimes committed against women and girls after the taking of Kabul. , in August 2021.
