The International Criminal Court’s main district lawyer on Thursday said he was searching for apprehension warrants versus aged Taliban leaders in Afghanistan over the mistreatment of females, a prison offense versus mankind.
Karim Khan said there have been smart premises to assume that Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and first justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani “bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds”.
Khan said that Afghan females and women, together with the LGBTQ neighborhood, had been encountering “an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban.
“Our activity signals that the status for females and ladies in Afghanistan is not appropriate,” added Khan.
ICC judges will now contemplate Khan’s utility earlier than deciding whether or not to challenge the warrants — a course of that would take weeks and even months.
The court docket, based mostly in The Hague, was set as much as rule on the world’s worst crimes, equivalent to struggle crimes and crimes in opposition to humanity.
It has no police power of its personal and depends on its 125 member states to hold out its warrants — with blended outcomes.
In principle which means anybody topic to an ICC arrest warrant can not journey to a member state for worry of being detained.
Khan warned he would quickly be searching for further purposes for different Taliban officers.
– ‘A victory’ –
Akhundzada inherited the Taliban management in May 2016 after a US drone strike in Pakistan killed his predecessor.
Believed to be in his 60s or 70s, the reclusive supreme chief guidelines by decree from the Taliban motion’s birthplace in southern Kandahar.
Haqqani was an in depth affiliate of Taliban founder Mullah Omar and served as a negotiator throughout discussions with US representatives in 2020.
ICC prosecutor Khan argued the Taliban was ” extraordinarily” repressing resistance by crimes ” consisting of homicide, jail time, abuse, rape and numerous different varieties of sex-related bodily violence, carried out loss, and numerous different savage acts”.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated in a press release the prosecutor’s actions ought to put the Taliban’s exclusion of girls and women from public life again on the worldwide agenda.
“This is a crucial minute for Afghan females and ladies that have actually been waiting a lot also wish for justice,” HRW’s girls’s rights deputy director, Heather Barr, advised AFP, calling for ” numerous different initiatives to carry the Taliban fully answerable”.
The transfer was praised by Afghan girls activists, together with Shukria Barakzai, an Afghan former lawmaker and the ousted authorities’s ex-ambassador to Norway.
“It’s a success,” she advised AFP from London.
“This likewise can be counted as (an) crucial accomplishment for feminism around the world … and especially for females in Afghanistan.”
The UN particular rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, known as the transfer ” an important motion … for accountability in Afghanistan” on X.
– ‘Gender apartheid’ –
After sweeping again to energy in August 2021, the Taliban authorities pledged a softer rule than their first rein from 1996-2001. But they shortly imposed restrictions on girls and women that the United Nations has labelled ” intercourse racism”.
Edicts according to their interpretation of Islamic regulation have squeezed girls and women from public life.
They have barred women from secondary college and girls from college, making Afghanistan the one nation on this planet to impose such bans.
Taliban authorities imposed restrictions on girls working for non-governmental teams and different employment, with hundreds of girls shedding authorities jobs — or being paid to remain at dwelling.
Beauty salons have been closed and girls blocked from visiting public parks, gyms and baths in addition to travelling lengthy distances with no male chaperone.
A ” vice and benefit” regulation introduced final summer time ordered girls to not sing or recite poetry in public and for his or her voices and our bodies to be ” hid” exterior the house.
The couple of constant to be females tv audio system use restricted headscarves and encounter masks in accordance with a 2022 diktat by Akhundzada that females cowl no matter nevertheless their eyes and arms in public.
The worldwide neighborhood has really condemned the constraints, which proceed to be a vital sticking issue within the Taliban authorities’ quest of essential acknowledgment, which it has really not gotten from any sort of state.
The Taliban authorities have really disregarded worldwide objection of their plans, stating all residents’ authorized rights are provided beneath Islamic regulation.
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