A prominent group of Afghan and Iranian women are backing a campaign calling for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime under international law.
The campaign, launched on International Women’s Day, reflects a belief that the current laws covering discrimination against women do not capture the systematic nature of the policies imposed in Afghanistan and Iran to downgrade the status of women in society.
Signatories of the open letter include the Iranian Nobel peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi; the first female deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament, Fawzia Koofi; a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Benafsha Yaqoobi; as well as many activists still fighting for their rights in Afghanistan and Iran.
While there is a crime of apartheid in international law, it applies only to racial groups, not to gender.
The word apartheid comes from the Afrikaans word for “apart” and was first used to describe the treatment of black people in South Africa under white minority rule from 1948 to the early 1990s.
The authors of the open letter, including international lawyers, argue that the legal definition of apartheid as a crime against humanity, adopted by the UN in 1973 and supported by the 1998 Rome Statute, does not as currently interpreted fit the case of Afghanistan and Iran, even if the descriptive term does.
“It is paramount to understand that gender apartheid currently only has power as a descriptive term,” said Gissou Nia, one of the human rights lawyers backing the campaign. “Under international law, the crime of apartheid only applies to racial hierarchies, not hierarchies based on gender. This campaign will seek to expand the set of moral, political and legal tools available to mobilise international action against and ultimately end systems of gender apartheid.”
The letter argues that under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan are banned from education, employment in NGOs and in government, and from travelling long distances without a male guardian, all while having to abide by a severe dress code.
It says: “In the Islamic Republic of Iran, women are banned from many fields of study, sporting events, from traveling without a male guardian, are worth half a man under the law and are forced to wear compulsory hijab. These bans, and the broader legal systems they belong to, seek to establish and maintain women’s subjugation to men and the state. Violation of these laws can lead to violence, imprisonment and death.”
The authors of the letter say they are not being discriminatory against the norms of Muslim societies, or seeking to impose western cultural values, but are instead addressing systematic attempts to subjugate women that have no place in any society, regardless of religion.
The Rome Statute defines apartheid in Article 7, paragraph 2 (h), as “inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”.
Increasingly, leading Muslim politicians and clerics in Gulf states and populous Muslim states such as Indonesia are willing to criticise the Taliban’s refusal to allow girls above secondary school age to be educated, saying there is nothing in the Qur’an or Muslim religious teaching that permits women to be held back in this way.
