As the 70th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) unfolds this month, Afghan women are calling on U.N. member states to take a consequential step to improve the status of women globally – particularly in places where the lives and rights of women and girls are most threatened. 

Earlier this year, the United Nations completed the first round of preparatory negotiations for a new Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. It will be the world’s first standalone treaty dedicated to preventing and punishing crimes against humanity. Member states are now being asked to submit proposed amendments to the draft text. 

Nowhere are crimes against women more evident than in Afghanistan, recently ranked the worst country in the world for women. Afghan women and human rights advocates are calling for the addition of a single word – “gender” – to the Convention’s definition of the crime of apartheid. This simple but powerful addition would effectively criminalize gender apartheid under international law. 

The concept captures a reality that existing legal categories fail to fully describe. While gender persecution, codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, addresses certain forms of discrimination, it does not fully capture systems of governance that institutionalize the exclusion of women. Gender apartheid, as increasingly defined by jurists and scholars, describes precisely such systems: legal regimes that systematically segregate and subordinate women and girls, embedding inequality in law itself. 

A long list of eminent people, prominent organizations, and a growing list of countries have already signaled their backing for the explicit inclusion of gender apartheid within international law. More states should now join them.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, Afghan women and girls live under sweeping and systematic restrictions on nearly every aspect of their lives. Girls have been barred from secondary school and university. Women have been pushed out of most forms of employment. Freedom of movement has been curtailed. Even visiting a medical facility without a male guardian is restricted – a policy with often deadly consequences. 

These measures are not isolated acts of discrimination. They are coordinated policies designed to exclude women from public life.

And they are getting worse. 

The Taliban recently released their Criminal Procedure Code that codifies what Afghan women have endured for years: a system where obedience is enforced through fear and that denies women protection from harm or access to justice. Among its more egregious provisions, the law limits access to legal counsel, fails to criminalize sexual violence against children, imposes severe penalties on critics of the regime, and incentivizes citizens to inform on each other. 

The code entrenches inequality. It establishes a caste-like hierarchy in which clergy – often including Taliban members – receive mere verbal admonitions for crimes, whereas at the bottom, “lower class” people face corporal punishment and imprisonment. 

Article 32 of the law further stipulates that a violent husband faces no punishment unless a woman can prove severe, visible injury, like broken bones. Those who shelter women fleeing abusive marriages may themselves be criminalized. Domestic abuse, already worsening because of the lack of legal protections, is effectively normalized. In fact, under the code the penalty for domestic violence is in fact less serious than the penalty for animal abuse.

This is control, written into law and enforced through fear. This systematic oppression is precisely what the Convention’s recognition of a distinct “gender apartheid” offense seeks to address. The concept recognizes that discriminatory laws, policies, and institutions can function together as a system of governance designed to permanently subordinate women and girls. Recognizing gender apartheid would help close a critical gap in international law by acknowledging that such regimes are not simply collections of individual abuses, but coordinated systems of domination.

Throughout this CSW, governments have issued statements condemning the Taliban’s latest restrictions over women’s rights. It’s time for those sentiments to find expression in law. 

Between now and April 30, U.N. member states have a narrow window to publicly support the explicit inclusion of gender apartheid in the draft Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. Doing so would meaningfully protect women and girls not only in Afghanistan today, but globally tomorrow, from institutionalized discrimination and violence. 

In Afghanistan, where we often hear from girls and women who wonder if the world has turned its back on them, the codification of gender apartheid in the new Crimes Against Humanity Convention would represent one of the few tangible responses to a human rights crisis that should remain at the forefront of the international community’s agenda, until gender apartheid ends.

Five painful years since the Taliban’s return to power, their determination to systemize the dehumanization of women remains unabated. Misogyny remains as central to the movement’s ideological goals as when they ruled previously. The new Criminal Procedure Code shows they have no intent of moderating. As the Taliban codify gender apartheid, the international community must codify its undoing, sending a clear message that international justice is on the side of the world’s women and girls.