Gordon Brown has called for the Taliban’s “vicious” repression of women and girls to be declared a crime against humanity, as the second anniversary looms of the hardline militia’s seizure of power in Afghanistan.
The former Prime Minister’s comments come after senior Tory MP Tobias Ellwood sparked anger for arguing the fundamentalists had improved security. In a video posted from Helmand province last month, he criticised Britain for failing to engage with them since the chaotic exit of Western armed forces in August 2021.
Mr Brown, now a UN special envoy for global education, said he was not opposed to dialogue with the Taliban, as long it was led by Muslim countries and clerics to explain the central importance of rights for women and girls.
But a parallel prosecution and sanctions were needed to keep up the pressure on the Taliban’s “gender apartheid”, he said, after the mullahs demolished two decades of progress on human rights in Afghanistan, barring women and girls from education and public life, or leaving the home without a male escort.
The former Labour leader said the evidence was “absolutely overwhelming” to uphold a prosecution by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
“It’s probably the most heinous, the most vicious, the most comprehensive abuse of human rights that’s taking place around the world today. And it is systematically being inflicted on millions of girls and women across Afghanistan,” Mr Brown told BBC Radio 4 in an interview broadcast on Thursday.
“It’s now two years since the chaos of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the people who have suffered most are girls and women - they’ve been excluded from education, excluded from employment, excluded from visiting public places, most recently in the last few days excluded from even visiting the cemeteries of loved ones,” he said.
Next Tuesday marks the anniversary of the Taliban recapturing Kabul following a lightning offensive. Britain scrambled to pull out its military and diplomatic personnel, but thousands of Afghan interpreters and other support staff who had assisted UK armed forces, including women, were left behind.
Since then, the United Nations and rights groups have catalogued a growing list of abuses by the Islamist hardliners. In April, they barred Afghan women from working for the United Nations, which UN chief Antonio Guterres condemned as “an intolerable violation of the most basic human rights”.
The following month, Mr Guterres convened an international meeting to coordinate the global community’s response on Afghanistan but said he was opposed to “recognition of the de facto Taliban authorities”.
Mr Ellwood, however, last month said that Afghanistan was now a “country transformed” and urged the Government to reopen Britain’s embassy in Kabul. The Conservative said “security has vastly improved, corruption is down and the opium trade has all but disappeared”.
He apologised after a backlash, but still faces the threat of a no-confidence vote to unseat him as chairman of the Defence Select Committee when the House of Commons returns from its summer recess next month.
