UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations (UN) has called the International Criminal Court to declare gender discrimination in Afghanistan a crime against humanity.
Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and former prime minister of the UK, said while discussing the issue of girls’ education in Afghanistan at a news conference, “The legal opinion we have received reveals that the denial of employment to Afghan women and education to Afghan girls is gender discrimination, which should consider as a crime against humanity, and the International Criminal Court should prosecute it.”
He claimed that 54 of the Taliban’s 80 proclamations directly target women and girls and deny them their rights. According to him, the Taliban has added more restrictions, including prohibitions against women and girls attending public events like graves and university exams.
The Independent Human Rights Commission of Afghanistan has been dissolved, and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has emerged as the “feared ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice.” That being the case, Brown highlighted that “the International Criminal Court ought to declare this gender discrimination as a crime against humanity and probe with a view to the arrest and prosecution of those responsible.”
Brown asked the international community to demonstrate that education is possible for the people of Afghanistan and called for the release of NGO leaders who are now behind bars for advocating for the rights of women and girls.
To convince Kandahar’s clerics to lift a ban on girls’ education and women’s employment, which “has no basis in the Quran or the Islamic religion,” he pleaded with Muslim-majority nations to support the mission. He added that this isn’t about pitting one faith against another; instead, it’s about “coming together to say that the Kandahar clerics have misunderstood what Islam’s fundamental teaching is on girls’ education.
We might succeed, Brown continued, if religious clerics could demonstrate that Islam truly supports girls’ education and that Afghanistan cannot develop into a prosperous nation if it denies the right to education to half its population. In August 2021, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, and since then, they have prohibited Afghan women from pursuing higher education and hiring them in many positions in the governmental sector.
