UN Envoy Urges ICC to Prosecute Taliban for Crimes Against Humanity

Date: 16 August 2023 - 21:13

News ID: ۱۱۸۳۲۵

UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The International Criminal Court should prosecute Taliban leaders for a crime against humanity for denying education and employment to Afghan girls and women, the UN special envoy for global education said.
Gordon Brown told a virtual UN press conference on the second anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan that its rulers are responsible for “the most egregious, vicious and indefensible violation of women’s rights and girls’ rights in the world today.”
The former British prime minister said he has sent a legal opinion to ICC prosecutor Karim Khan that shows the denial of education and employment is “gender discrimination, which should count as a crime against humanity, and it should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.”
The Taliban took power in August 2021, during the final weeks of the U.S. and NATO forces’ pullout after 20 years of war. As they did during their previous rule of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban gradually reimposed their harsh rule, barring girls from school beyond the sixth grade and women from most jobs, public spaces and gyms and recently closing beauty salons.
Brown urged major Muslim countries to send a delegation of clerics to Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar, the home of Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada, to make the case that bans on women’s education and employment have “no basis in the Qur’an or the Islamic religion” — and to lift them.
He said he believes “there’s a split within the regime,” with many people in the education ministry and around the government in the capital, Kabul, who want to see the rights of girls to education restored. “And I believe that the clerics in Kandahar have stood firmly against that, and indeed continue to issue instructions.”
The Taliban’s chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, brushed aside questions about restrictions on girls and women in an Associated Press interview late Monday in Kabul, saying the status quo will remain. He also said the Taliban view their rule of Afghanistan as open-ended.
Brown said the Taliban should be told that if girls are allowed to go to secondary school and university again, education aid to Afghanistan, which was cut after the bans were announced, will be restored.