Belarra calls for ICC to investigate treatment of Afghan women as a “crime against humanity”

Eduardo González Podemos MP and deputy spokesperson for the Mixed Parliamentary Group, Ione Belarra, has urged the Government to promote and support investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) so that the treatment of Afghan women and girls is judged as a “crime against humanity” and so that “those responsible for the more than one hundred norms and edicts that oppress women and girls in Afghanistan today are held accountable before justice.” In a Non-Law Proposal presented on September 24 for debate and approval in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Congress, the former Minister of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 in the previous coalition government of Pedro Sánchez denounces that, on August 21, the Taliban regime of Afghanistan ratified a morality law with more than one hundred pages of content and 35 articles with a main objective: "to toughen the repression that women in the country have been suffering since the fundamentalist group took over the Government by force three years ago." "The text, promulgated by the supreme spiritual leader, Haibatullah Akhundzadá, includes measures such as the prohibition of their voices being heard in public spaces or their faces being seen in the street," she adds. “After two decades of Western tutelage since President George W. Bush decided to start the so-called Global War on Terror there in response to the 9/11 attacks, the withdrawal of troops by the United States and its NATO allies in the summer of 2021 left a power vacuum in the country, which was thus handed back to the Taliban,” she continues. “Afghan women and girls, who before all this went to school and had freedom of movement, are seeing their fundamental rights violated now more than ever and without international authorities acting or taking sides to prevent what the UN has been calling gender apartheid since the suspension of the Constitution by the Taliban regime,” denounces the spokesperson for the Joint Group. As a result, Afghan women are excluded from the education system and the labour market, they must comply with a strict dress code that requires them to be covered from head to toe and prohibits them from wearing high heels or going to beauty salons, they cannot leave their homes unless they are accompanied by a closely related male such as a father, brother or husband known as a ‘mahram’, they are banned from playing sports and cannot get on a bus with men because transport is also segregated, among many other things. In addition, according to the UN, early and forced marriages are increasing in Afghanistan and “gender-based violence and femicides, which, in addition, go unpunished due to the progressive dismantling by the Taliban of the institutional framework that existed to help surviving victims, leaving them subject to Islamic law (sharia) and in total helplessness and danger,” Belarra denounces. Organisations such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists consider that all these restrictions imposed by the Taliban on the rights of women and girls, together with the use of arbitrary arrest and detention, forced disappearance and torture and other ill-treatment, “constitute the crime against humanity of gender-based persecution in a context of humanitarian crisis that is already devastating in itself,” warns the MP. “The international community and, very especially, the Western powers, have, at the very least, the moral responsibility to position ourselves in this scenario of emergency and violation of human rights,” the text adds. For this reason, the motion urges the Government to “publicly reject all violence against Afghan women and girls for the fact of being women and promote actions within the European Union to contribute to their protection, in line with Spain's foreign policy strategy based on respect for international law and the protection of human rights.” The motion also calls for a “positive response to requests for transfer registered by asylum seekers and refugees of Afghan nationality in Spanish embassies and consulates”, particularly in Pakistan and other countries in the region, and for the promotion and support of ICC investigations “so that the treatment of Afghan women and girls is judged as a crime against humanity, and so that those responsible for the more than one hundred norms and edicts that oppress women and girls in Afghanistan today are held accountable before justice”.

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