The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Tuesday for senior Taliban officials on charges of persecuting women and girls, a crime against humanity.
The warrants target the group’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhunzada and the head of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani.
Judges said there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect that the two Taliban officials had been committing gender-based persecution since seizing power nearly four years ago.
“While the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement.
The Taliban had “severely deprived” girls and women of the rights to education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion, ICC judges said.
They also accuse the leaders of persecuting “other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as ‘allies of girls and women.’”
Afghan burqa-clad women stand in a queue as they wait to receive food being distributed as an aid by the World Food Programme (WFP) organization at Nawabad Kako Sahib area in Baraki Barak district of Logar Province on January 7, 2024. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP)
The court said the alleged crimes had been committed between August 15, 2021, when the Taliban took power, and continued until at least January 20, 2025.
The warrants were issued following a request from ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan in January, who at the time said that Afghan women and girls, as well as the LGBTQ community, were facing “an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban.”
“Our action signals that the status quo for women and girls in Afghanistan is not acceptable,” he added. Khan warned at the time he would soon be seeking additional warrants for other Taliban officials.
Khan was himself placed on leave in May amid an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct by him.
Karim Khan, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court looks up prior to a press conference in The Hague, Netherlands, July 3, 2023. (Peter Dejong/AP)
The ICC, based in The Hague, was set up to rule on the world’s worst crimes, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has no police force of its own and relies on member states to carry out its arrest warrants — with mixed results.
In theory, this means anyone subject to an ICC arrest warrant cannot travel to a member state for fear of being detained.
Ongoing persecution
After sweeping back to power in August 2021, the Taliban authorities pledged a softer rule than their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001. Nevertheless, they quickly imposed a system of restrictions on women and girls that the UN has labeled “gender apartheid.”
Edicts in line with their interpretation of Islamic law handed down by Akhundzada, who rules by decree from the movement’s birthplace in southern Kandahar, have squeezed women from public life.
Afghanistan became the only country in the world to bar girls from secondary school and women from university in the first 18 months of the Taliban’s rule after they ousted the US-backed government.
A Taliban fighter stands guard as women wait to receive food rations distributed by a humanitarian aid group, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on May 23, 2023. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
Authorities also imposed restrictions on women working for non-governmental groups and other employment, with thousands of women losing government jobs — or being paid to stay home.
Beauty salons have been closed and women have been blocked from visiting public parks, gyms, and baths, as well as traveling long distances without a male chaperone.
A “vice and virtue” law announced last summer ordered women not to sing or recite poetry in public and for their voices and bodies to be “concealed” outside the home.
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