United Nations experts on discrimination against women and girls have called on the international community to formally recognize "gender apartheid" as a crime against humanity.
Emphasizing the grave situation of women and girls under the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the five-member panel of experts from Mexico, the United States, China, Serbia, and Uganda said the step is long overdue.
"The Taliban's rule makes codifying gender apartheid in international law particularly urgent," a UN press statement said.
"It would allow the international community to better identify and address the regime’s attacks on Afghan women and girls," the statement added.
Since seizing power in August 2021 as international troops left the country, the Taliban has reinstated one of the most rigid gender discrimination policies in the world.
Its government has banned women and teenage girls from education and employment in most sectors. The Taliban's growing restrictions against women are aimed at controlling their appearance and their public interactions.
Afghan women are also banned from leisure activities and visiting bathhouses. Women are barred from or discouraged from running or visiting beauty salons and restaurants.
“State laws, policies, and practices that relegate women to conditions of extreme inequality and oppression, with the intent of effectively extinguishing their human rights, reflect the very core of apartheid systems,” the UN statement said.
The UN experts recommended including gender apartheid as a crime against humanity under Article 2 of the draft articles on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. The UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee is currently considering the draft legislation.
"Women are detained and tortured under various pretexts," a woman resident of the capital, Kabul, told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi. “I hope that gender apartheid will be recognized in Afghanistan."
Another woman in he capital told Radio Azadi that gender discrimination needs to end soon.
"Don't perpetuate this crisis,” she said.
For more than a year, Afghan women's rights activists have been campaigning to declare the Taliban's treatment of Afghan women and girls as gender apartheid.