ICC issues warrant for Taliban’s supreme leader for persecution of women | Global development

The worldwide legal court docket has issued arrest warrants for 2 senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes towards humanity for the persecution of girls and ladies.In an announcement, the ICC mentioned on Tuesday there have been “cheap grounds to consider” the Taliban’s supreme chief, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had ordered insurance policies that disadvantaged girls and ladies of “training, privateness and household life and the freedoms of motion, expression, thought, conscience and faith”.Afghan human rights activists have known as for the Taliban’s system of depriving girls and ladies of rights and freedoms and imposing segregation to be recognised as gender apartheid.The Taliban’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani.Tahera Nasiri, an Afghan girls’s rights activist now residing in Canada, mentioned the arrest warrant was an acknowledgment of the abuses Afghan girls confronted. “For 4 years, the Taliban have informed us to remain silent, keep at house, cowl our faces, surrender our training, our voices and our desires. Now, a global court docket is saying: ‘Sufficient. This can be a crime.’“Even when Akhundzada and Haqqani by no means sit in court docket, they now carry the mark of worldwide criminals,” she mentioned. “They’re now not simply leaders of Afghanistan, they’re wished males.”The court docket mentioned the alleged crimes had taken place because the Taliban took management of Afghanistan in 2021 till January 2025, when the ICC’s chief prosecutor first sought the warrant.Since returning to energy, the militant Islamists have banned girls from paid work and ladies from secondary training, in addition to issuing a sequence of edicts that ban girls from many areas of public life, together with strolling in parks and even talking in public.Human rights teams have known as on the worldwide neighborhood to assist the ICC in imposing the arrest warrants. Liz Evenson, Human Rights Watch’s worldwide justice director, mentioned: “Senior Taliban leaders at the moment are wished males for his or her alleged persecution of girls, ladies, and gender non-conforming folks.”In June, the UN accused the Taliban of eradicating authorized protections for girls and turning the justice system right into a instrument for entrenching an “institutionalised system of gender oppression, persecution and domination”. The UN report additionally highlighted the suspension of a legislation on violence towards girls that included protections towards rape and compelled marriage.When asserting that he was in search of a warrant in January, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, mentioned the 2 leaders had been “criminally accountable” for gender-based persecution in Afghanistan and that he would even be in search of warrants for the arrest of different Taliban leaders.“Our dedication to pursue accountability for gender-based crimes, together with gender persecution, stays an absolute precedence,” he mentioned.Amnesty Worldwide has additionally known as on the worldwide neighborhood to recognise gender apartheid as against the law below worldwide legislation.Parwana Ibrahimkhail Nijrabi, a former Taliban prisoner now residing in Germany, mentioned: “Arresting these males gained’t be straightforward, particularly with some nations nonetheless participating with the Taliban. However I hope member states of the ICC take this severely and act to arrest them.”