More than 60 international law experts and Women Human Rights Defenders recently issued the “International Declaration on Gender Apartheid and Its Destructive Consequences” to mark the fifth anniversary of Afghan women’s resistance to the Taliban since their second takeover of Afghanistan. A product of 18 months of global consultations by an Afghan and international drafting group, the Declaration is an expert instrument in the vein of the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles and the 2011 Maastricht Principles, which clarify international legal obligations on particular topics and seek to advance their implementation. The Declaration can also be viewed as a means for determining applicable rules of international law pursuant to Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, which lays out the sources of international law. As such, the Declaration clarifies the totality of international legal principles applicable to situations of gender apartheid and calls for their comprehensive use and progressive development for ending the destructive consequences of gender apartheid across the globe.
While non-binding, the Declaration is intended to be persuasive, signed by some of the world’s foremost experts on international law, on women’s human rights, and on Afghanistan, which tragically has become the archetypal example of gender apartheid. Since August 2021, the Taliban have eliminated virtually all human rights for Afghan women and girls through hundreds of decrees and so-called laws enforced by discriminatory and punitive institutions with dystopian names such as the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. As noted by one of us, Zarqa Yaftali, during a recent event to release the Declaration, the Taliban have implemented “an institutionalized system designed to exclude women and girls from education, employment, political decision-making, and public life. Every year the system continues, the more entrenched and damaging it becomes for future generations.”
Signatories to the Declaration hail from every region of the world. They include diverse, prominent Afghan and South African advocates, former President of Ireland Mary Robinson and former Vice President of Costa Rica Elizabeth Odio Benito, as well as three Nobel laureates, former and current United Nations officials and experts, and former judges from some of the world’s leading national and international courts. The question going forward is will the international community heed its urgent call for more effective action and immediate use of international law to end gender apartheid in Afghanistan and beyond?
Key Principles
Together, the signatories to the Declaration pronounce 12 principles in solidarity with decades of advocacy and leadership by frontline women human rights defenders across affected regions, including in Afghanistan, using the concept of “gender apartheid” to counter systematic oppression. Rooted in international law, these principles provide the basis for the main objectives of the Declaration.
First, the Declaration names the full scope of rules found in international human rights law and international criminal law that are applicable to situations of gender discrimination and persecution and rise to the level of gender apartheid, and how they should be progressively interpreted and further developed in response to such situations.
Second, building off of scholarship, U.N. documents, and legal analysis, applying an innovative understanding of the prohibition of apartheid found in the 1998 Rome Statute and 1973 Apartheid Convention, the Declaration endorses a clear definition of gender apartheid as:
inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one gender group over any other gender group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.
A third central objective of the Declaration is to support codification of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity. The Declaration recognizes that gender apartheid entails uniquely grave and intergenerational human rights violations constituting crimes against humanity. De jure systems of gender apartheid as we see in Afghanistan gravely exacerbate humanitarian crises, preventing non-discriminatory aid delivery and leading to refugee flows. Simply put, it is a matter of life and death. As such, the Declaration joins many civil society organizations and states calling for gender apartheid to be explicitly codified without delay in the forthcoming Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity as well as in the national laws of states around the world.
Fourth, alongside codification efforts, the Declaration documents the growing chorus of states across regions, most recently South Africa, recognizing the concept of gender apartheid as evidence of a developing customary international law norm. This crystallization is complimentary to codification efforts and has been reinforced by dozens of South African anti-apartheid activists including former first lady Graça Machel; dozens of U.N. officials since 1999, including U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, as well as U.N. treaty bodies, working groups, and special procedures; and hundreds of members of parliament, former presidents, Nobel laureates, judges and prosecutors of international courts and tribunals as well as leading civil society organizations who have applied the gender apartheid framework to situations such as Afghanistan in a letter and a legal brief to U.N. member states drafted by the End Gender Apartheid Campaign.
Finally, importantly, the Declaration determines that gender apartheid is an illegal situation, and the document provides a holistic distillation of the totality of international legal obligations that are violated and what the law requires in terms of responsibility and accountability. Given the gravity and systematic, institutionalized nature of gender apartheid, it implicates individuals and entities, states as well as non-state actors, and all those complicit in the practice.
Thus, the Declaration emphasizes that full accountability, under all applicable international legal norms, is urgently required for ending gender apartheid and for restoration of the rights of women and girls subjected to the practice. Further, there can be no justification or defense under international law for gender apartheid whatsoever, whether it be on cultural, religious or other grounds. Moreover, drawing support from international jurisprudence, the Declaration affirms that women and girls fleeing from such an illegal situation should be presumed to qualify for refugee status.
Why Now?
So why adopt the Declaration now? The eminent signatories to the Declaration are using the weight of their names and reputations to issue an urgent call to action to the international community. The last five years in Afghanistan have constituted an abject failure to prevent, suppress, punish, and end gender apartheid under international law. While the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Taliban leaders for gender persecution, investigations have stalled as the Court faces existential threats.
Meanwhile, the Taliban’s courts enforce the persecution of women and girls, and the targets have no recourse to justice or protection from the Taliban. Instead, the perpetrators themselves are increasingly normalized via meetings with foreign diplomats and invitations to official meetings, as if the Taliban regime were legitimate, even while the victim-survivors are excluded and forgotten. Such acts and omissions have facilitated the perpetuation of grave human rights violations against women and girls and such systems of oppression writ large, while undermining what should be internationally guaranteed rights of women and girls everywhere. This shameful complacency and complicity must end now. Thus, the purposes of the Declaration include:
- promoting codification of gender apartheid in the proposed Crimes against Humanity Convention currently being drafted in the United Nations;
- providing Afghan women rights defenders and their supporters with international legal principles to use pending codification of that treaty (which will not happen before 2029), because women on the frontlines cannot wait; and
- promoting the use of forward-looking, comprehensive and gender-inclusive interpretations of international law, including with respect to the concept of apartheid, to more effectively support efforts to end gender apartheid as soon as possible.
The Way Forward
Adopting the Declaration is just the beginning. Achieving its objectives will turn on further action, as was the case following adoption of similar non-binding expert instruments articulating international legal principles such as the 2006 Yogyakarta and the 2011 Maastricht Principles. These instruments were subsequently cited widely in U.N. mechanism reports and decisions; regional body resolutions; and national court decisions, for example, and even became a basis for draft treaty text. Similarly, this Declaration is meant to be another “tool in the toolkit” used in a complementary, comprehensive manner alongside different strategies and approaches for accountability and for ending gender apartheid. As such, we hope to see it widely promoted by international lawyers and civil society through further translations of the text, creation of associated materials to guide effective use of the Declaration, hosting of information events in multiple languages, and citing of the Declaration in advocacy and scholarship. Aligned organizations are invited to join a growing coalition endorsing the Declaration.
Further, the Declaration can be used by states in their negotiations on the proposed crimes against humanity treaty and by national prosecutors and courts for accountability through universal jurisdiction statutes as well as in crafting national legislation and policies for sanctioning conditions of gender apartheid as in Afghanistan. Judges and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court as well as investigators at the new mechanism for Afghanistan can use the Declaration for framing the facts of alleged crimes; describing the widespread and systematic context for crimes against humanity; and accurately characterizing the gravity of gender apartheid situations. Use of the concept of gender apartheid in these ways is a critical form of expressive justice for the victims, who have been calling their oppression gender apartheid for decades.
States also may use the Declaration in future as a basis for a proposed amendment to the ICC’s Rome Statute to include gender apartheid as a discrete underlying crime against humanity. Further, the Declaration should be useful in strategic litigation efforts towards a potential case under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) before the International Court of Justice. Finally, U.N. mechanisms such as its special procedures, the U.N. General Assembly, and the U.N. Security Council, as well as regional bodies and courts should cite to the Declaration in their communications, reports, resolutions, policies and decisions as has been done with other such instruments. Such efforts could even culminate in adoption of a similar declaration by states or the UN.
Ultimately, the goal for the Declaration is to relentlessly spotlight the scourge of gender apartheid in Afghanistan and other contexts until such systemic regimes of oppression against women and girls are eradicated around the globe. The Declaration is a message of solidarity and appreciation for the leadership of Afghan women human rights defenders who have courageously defied repression in their own country even in these times of global backlash against the rights of women and girls. They have inspired the world and helped to change international law itself, a process that the world is obliged to continue and accelerate.
(Authors’ note: Hannah Garry and Karima Bennoune were members of the Afghan-International drafting group for the experts’ declaration on gender apartheid, chaired by Karima. They are signatories to the declaration along with Zarqa Yaftali. Afghan Woman Human Rights Defender Zubaida Akbar chaired the widely attended panel event on Aug. 13, 2026, launching the declaration with Yaftali, Bennoune, Garry, Afghanistan Ambassador Manizha Bakhtari, and Dr. Davood Moradian, Director General, Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies.)
