The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) today requested arrest warrants against the Taliban supreme leader and the Chief Justice of the Afghan Supreme Court for the persecution of women in Afghanistan.
"There are reasonable grounds to believe that the Taliban Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and the Chief Justice of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of gender-related persecution," said Prosecutor Karim Khan in a statement released today.
According to the prosecutor, "Afghan women and girls, as well as members of the LGBTQI+ community, are facing unprecedented and repeated abject persecution by the Taliban," which, as he stressed, is unacceptable.
After regaining power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban promised to be more tolerant of women than during their first rule between 1996 and 2001, when they were stripped of almost all their rights.
But the authorities have gradually imposed drastic restrictions, prompting the UN to denounce "gender apartheid".
ICC judges will now consider the prosecutor's request before deciding whether to issue arrest warrants, a process that could take weeks or months.
Hibatullah Akhundzada lives in virtual seclusion in Kandahar, a historic Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, and rarely appears in public.
The situation in Afghanistan has raised growing concerns among human rights defenders, with Human Rights Watch's (HRW) 2024 report calling it one of the countries in the world where women's rights are most severely disenfranchised.
Stressing that the restrictions imposed by the Taliban have been tightened every year since they returned to power, HRW recalled that last year, the 'de facto' government - not recognized by any state - began banning women from free access to health care, playing sports, visiting parks or singing in public.
In late 2024, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that the Taliban regime was imposing increasingly harsh measures on Afghan women working in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and called for an end to the growing exclusion of women from society.
Volker Türk said that on 26 December, Afghanistan's Minister of Economy ordered national and international NGOs to comply with a decree issued two years ago in which he threatened to revoke their licenses if they continued to provide employment to women.
Shortly after seizing power around three and a half years ago, the Taliban banned women from attending schools, jobs and even public services, including medical schools in a country where women’s healthcare is required to be provided by women.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) also warned at the time that the measure could lead to more deaths, due to its long-term consequences on the health system, not only by reducing women’s ability to earn an income but also by restricting adequate prenatal and maternal care.
The decision, approved by the group’s supreme leader, closed the doors of the few educational institutions that remained open to female education in the country.
The fundamentalists had already closed the doors of universities to female students in December 2022, which led many to seek education at these institutes to continue their studies and try to increase their chances of getting a job, which is also made more difficult by the restrictions.
The Taliban enacted the so-called “Law for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” in August, institutionalizing discrimination against women and extending restrictions, including a “law of silence” that stipulates that women’s voices may only be heard “in cases of necessity.”
The Taliban leader also recently issued a decree banning the opening of new windows in buildings that overlook other homes where women may be living.
“Anyone who builds a structure where the neighboring house is within a street distance shall not install windows facing the neighbor's house from which the courtyard or areas where women may sit or move are visible,” the law states.
As for existing windows that overlook neighboring properties, those that are at least the height of a person must be bricked up or covered.
