Over the past two weeks, Gaisu Yari listened as U.N. member states debated how the world should define, prevent and punish crimes against humanity — while, in real time, the Taliban codified women’s repression into law. She shares her reflections from New York.
In the past two weeks, while the U.N. Preparatory Committee convened in New York to advance discussions on a global treaty to prevent and punish crimes against humanity, I spent long hours sitting in the chamber listening to member states debate legal frameworks, procedures and accountability mechanisms.
On the third day of the meetings, while the language of gender, accountability and justice was being raised and debated, the Taliban announced their new criminal code, effectively codifying their repression into legalised dehumanisation. Within the criminal code, there are clauses formalising women’s second-class status, where punishments criminalise autonomy. Laws that treat ordinary acts — movement, learning, dissent — as offenses punishable by imprisonment.
While reading the criminal codes and sitting in the Sixth Committee chamber, the chasm between the nuances being debated and the reality on the ground could not be more stark.
In 2021, since the first decree told women and girls to remain home for their safety, some have tried to minimise the Taliban’s crushing repression by framing through the lens of religious or cultural practice. But this is not about faith or tradition. It is about power: a deliberate construction of a legal system designed to control, punish and erase women as political and legal subjects deserving of rights, freedoms and basic humanity.
The Taliban’s codification of its dehumanisation makes it undeniable. What was enforced through fear is now backed by law. As diplomats debated architecture, sequencing and process, the Taliban formally stripped women and girls in Afghanistan of legal personhood in real time. It is this systemic and legally sanctioned violence against women and girls that amounts to gender apartheid.
Indeed, the Taliban’s criminal code constructs a system where being a woman or a girl with agency becomes a punishable condition, and mere survival becomes its own extreme risk.
We also need to situate this new criminal code in the global backlash against women, girls and their right to gender justice. Afghan women and girls had been warning the world for years about the expansion of discriminatory systems, and their experiences shows how quickly rights can be dismantled when gender equality is treated as negotiable rather than fundamental.
Afghanistan did not get to this dark place overnight. Afghan women, activists and survivors have long sounded the alarm — about shrinking spaces globally, legal regression and the normalisation of exclusion. What is unfolding now is not an anomaly; it is a stark illustration of what happens when human rights are deprioritised, compromised and selectively defended. Afghanistan exposes a widening gap between international commitments to gender justice and the lived realities of women under systems of repression.
This is not the time for caution. It is time for ambition.
Following two weeks of discussions, the Sixth Committee approved the participation of non-governmental organisations without ECOSOC status, and I hope this will enable survivors and Afghan women-led civil society to be meaningfully included and prioritised. Survivors, especially Afghan women living under these laws and those in exile, are essential to this process.
Survivors bring precision to abstract debates. They reveal how systems of repression function cumulatively, how laws interact with fear and isolation, and how impunity is experienced when it is live.
It is this painful but invaluable experience and insight that will bring integrity and credibility to the process of defining how crimes against humanity are defined, prevented and punished.
Sitting in the Sixth Committee made one thing clear: crimes against humanity cannot be addressed through distance or abstraction. Those most targeted must be at the center of how justice is defined, shaped and pursued.
