It is the “most repressive country in the world” against women, according to a declaration made on March 8 by the UN, during the 47e International Women’s Day. The Taliban regime, back in Kabul 21 months ago, is harassing women by invoking religious precepts straight from the Middle Ages.
The regime’s treatment of half the population represents a “crime against humanity”, subject to international prosecution, reads a report published Friday by Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, entitled “The War of the Taliban against women”.
Women who can only go out with a chaperone and buried under a burqa; who are prohibited from working and studying, except in primary school. Women who are victims of “organized, generalized, systematic” exclusion and repression.
We remember the desperation of the girls at Kabul University last December when they ran into closed doors.
Perhaps the final highlight was the decree in March banning even work for NGOs, such as the UN “assistance mission,” where women were employed to work with women. A fine example of an ideology that prohibits the application of international aid and solidarity… moreover invoked by the Taliban who cry out against discrimination!
This report has the originality of being co-signed by two organizations, one of which, the International Commission of Jurists founded in 1952, insists on the legal angle of the Taliban excesses.
What is being proposed to alleviate the ordeal of Afghan women – and Afghans in general, in a country “of the death penalty, torture and degrading punishments” (Amnesty International report 2022). A country where, according to the UN, 97% of the population lived in poverty in 2022… compared to 47% in 2020, under the “nasty” foreign occupation (2001-2021).
Which occupation, despite its clumsiness and its ultimate failure, had built infrastructures, presided over the emergence of an urban middle class… and allowed women to breathe.
The report is a detailed legal analysis of what is happening in Afghanistan from the specific angle of women’s rights: a catalog of heinous and medieval horrors, worthy of the VIIe century.
Quote from Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International: “It is a war against women, banished from public life, prevented from accessing education, from working, from moving around, subjected to disappearances, tortured. »
This is therefore a very serious subject, which, according to the signatories, requires a specific and in-depth investigation, invoking international law. There is also an appeal to the International Criminal Court, the ICC which should, it is written, include the “crime against humanity of gender-based persecution”.
Another original element: the two organizations recommend that other States exercise the famous “universal jurisdiction” to try to bring to justice the members of the Taliban suspected of being responsible for these crimes.
The controversial concept of universal jurisdiction postulates that a crime committed in country X, justiciable under international law, should be able to be tried in country Y. In 1998, a Spanish judge had ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested in London , for the crimes of his regime in Chile (the procedure was unsuccessful).
By extension, the arrest warrant issued in March against Vladimir Putin is based on the same principle, since it theoretically commits the officials of countries that have signed the treaty founding the ICC, to arrest him and bring him to justice… if ever they fell to hand!
Small language criticism: we note, without being fooled, the total absence, in this tight text of 70 pages in small print – just like in the general report 2022 on Afghanistan by Amnesty International – of words like “Islamist”, ” Islamic”, “Koran”, “Muslim”. The word “sharia” may be found once or twice in passing, for example in a footnote.
This omission is not innocent. The Taliban regime is the highest stage of the regressive brutality of radical political Islam (with the Islamic State organization also on the podium, in Syria and Iraq a few years ago).
When we put Catholic authorities on trial for crimes committed against children, we are not afraid of the words “Catholic”, “priest” or “Church”. Why do we do things differently here?
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]