The Taliban regime in Afghanistan is to be taken to the UN’s top court by an alliance of four countries – the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and Canada – in a direct legal challenge to its oppressive policy on the rights of women and girls.
The decision was reached on the fringes of the UN General Assembly in New York this week on the grounds that there was “ample” evidence that the regime has been systematically violating the UN women’s convention which Afghanistan ratified in 2003.
The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women was adopted by the general assembly in 1979 and came into force in 1981. However, it was very publicly abandoned in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of 2021.
In the latest round of “vice and virtue” laws approved last month by supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, women are prohibited from speaking in public or showing their faces outside their homes – restrictions condemned by the UN as “intolerable”.
The legal action will be the first time that any country has been taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in a case asserting women’s rights – and the first time it has heard a case alleging gender discrimination.
Three of the four countries taking the case have female foreign ministers: Annalena Baerbock of Germany, Penny Wong of Australia, and Mēlanie Joly of Canada.
It’s also backed by the Dutch foreign minister, Caspar Veldkamp, who described the restrictions facing Afghan women and girls as “heartbreaking”.
“The result today is that women and girls are almost completely excluded from public life”, Mr Veldkamp said. “We cannot accept this. It cannot become a new normal.”
Under ICJ procedures, the Taliban has six months to improve women’s rights and must show the court’s judges in detail how it has done so.
If that doesn’t happen, then the regime may be referred to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, essentially an interim intergovernmental dispute resolution agency.
If the arbitration process is ignored by the Taliban – which most international legal experts believe it will be – then the court may consider the case and ultimately hand down a substantial verdict, although it has no power to enforce that ruling.
Given the Taliban ethos, human rights groups have called for “higher protection standards” and “safe migration pathways” for Afghan women.
Despite that, the Netherlands rejected at least one asylum application from an Afghan woman this summer under new rules designed specifically to increase the rejection rate, according to the refugee agency, Vluchtelingenwerk.
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