The new Nobel peace prize winner, the jailed Iranian human rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi, has joined a call by female activists and legal scholars for the UN to broaden the planned definition of crimes against humanity to codify gender apartheid.
The UN is scheduled to debate a draft treaty on crimes against humanity next week and she is joining a call for an “accountability vacuum” to be tackled by including gender apartheid in the document.
Other advocates include the former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the South African justice Richard Goldstone, the author Gloria Steinem, the former UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay, and three Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi, Malala Yousafzai and Nadia Murad. It has also been signed by the former international criminal court chief prosecutor Dr Fatou Bensouda.
In the joint letter to the UN, also backed by many Afghan female human rights activists, the authors say: “The failure to codify gender apartheid perpetuates an accountability vacuum that leaves many victims and survivors without remedy or reparation.”
The call is specifically aimed at extreme cases such as the Taliban’s oppression of women, but could prove controversial in some Islamic countries where the role of women is seen differently by some of its rulers, as not one of subjugation, but instead protection.
The UN has been debating for 12 months to reach agreement about a convention or treaty on prosecution and prevention of crimes against humanity, a process that is scheduled to culminate in October 2024.
Crimes against humanity are separate from war crimes, and can take place in peacetime and can be committed both by states and non-state actors. There is no internationally agreed universal multilateral treaty on crimes against humanity, let alone on protection against crimes against humanity.
The authors write: “The crime of gender apartheid is unique in animus and intent. It is distinct from other international crimes, including gender persecution, due to its dystopian ambition to maintain an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination, where the under class is subjugated for the dominant group’s benefit and survival, dehumanised, and cut off from the resources and access needed to overcome their choreographed oppression. The Taliban’s ever deepening and institutionalised oppression of Afghan women and girls is a case in point.”
They argue that by only including in the draft treaty the definition of “apartheid” as codified in the 1998 Rome statute of the international criminal court, the UN is “needlessly constrained to a 25-year-old articulation of race-based apartheid”.
They add: “It fails to account for gender-based apartheid, which has long been recognised by the international community, including the UN secretary general, António Guterres.
“As a consequence, there is a gap in the ability to hold perpetrators – both state and individual – to account for the totality of the crimes they have committed, and to recognise and repair the distinct and often transgenerational harms suffered by victims of gender apartheid.”
Through its commission, perpetrators of gender apartheid “seek to maintain a form of governance designed to systematically oppress and dominate a subset of society so that the dominant group may live alongside them and benefit from their subjugation,” they add.
“In Afghanistan, the Taliban have systematically eviscerated female autonomy and agency over their lives and futures. The Taliban’s system of governance has removed women and girls from public life – from parliament, offices, salons, universities and schools, parks and playgrounds, and protests – and sequestered them to the smallest possible concentric circle: a dot of existence behind their [or rather, their closest male relation’s] front door.”
