At a second when international progress on human rights typically appears to be faltering, the Worldwide Prison Court docket (ICC) has taken a long-overdue step ahead.
Final month, the ICC issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes towards humanity for the regime’s well-documented persecution of ladies and ladies. Notably, nonetheless, the courtroom additionally accused the Taliban officers, together with Supreme Chief Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, of committing crimes towards humanity by concentrating on LGBTQ individuals.
At a second when international progress on human rights typically appears to be faltering, the Worldwide Prison Court docket (ICC) has taken a long-overdue step ahead.
Final month, the ICC issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes towards humanity for the regime’s well-documented persecution of ladies and ladies. Notably, nonetheless, the courtroom additionally accused the Taliban officers, together with Supreme Chief Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, of committing crimes towards humanity by concentrating on LGBTQ individuals.
By issuing these warrants, the ICC has develop into the primary worldwide tribunal to find out that it’s a crime towards humanity to persecute individuals on the idea of sexual orientation or gender identification. For the worldwide LGBTQ neighborhood, it is a profound milestone.
The warrants pierce by means of the worldwide indifference that has too typically obscured the brutal realities confronted by queer individuals in battle zones. The highest courtroom’s motion is a robust promise that the worldwide battle for dignity and justice extends to each nook of our neighborhood, regardless of how lengthy they’ve been ignored or missed.
Since taking on Kabul in 2021, the Taliban regime has violently enforced a inflexible patriarchal order in Afghanistan. It has banned ladies and ladies from pursuing larger and secondary schooling, barred them from public life by proscribing their entry to employment and freedom of motion, and mandated the sporting of the burqa once more.
Below the extremist rule, LGBTQ Afghans have additionally endured a marketing campaign of terror, together with arrests, torture, sexual violence, and extrajudicial killings. Since August 2021, queer individuals have reportedly been detained and assaulted by Taliban police at checkpoints. The Taliban’s Supreme Court docket has proudly publicized the flogging of individuals accused of homosexuality. Final August, the identical edict that banned ladies from talking in public additionally reaffirmed that homosexuality is a criminal offense.
Although gender-based violence has been dedicated in wars all through historical past, worldwide legislation has been sluggish to deal with it as a critical crime. The 1998 treaty that created the ICC, often known as the Rome Statute, was the primary to categorise “gender persecution” as a criminal offense towards humanity. But it surely was by no means prosecuted through the courtroom’s first twenty years. Plus, there was no specific reference to LGBTQ individuals within the Rome Statute till 2022, when the ICC adopted a coverage on the crime of gender persecution and embraced a up to date, inclusive understanding of gender that explicitly contains LGBTQ protections.
Many jurists have lengthy argued that concentrating on individuals on the idea of sexual orientation and gender identification is a type of gender persecution, as a result of they’re being victimized for transgressing gender roles. However the ICC judges by no means had a chance to listen to this evaluation—till now.
That’s why the latest ICC arrest warrants are so historic. Below the ICC system, judges should decide that costs are legally sound earlier than warrants are issued. Whatever the end result of the circumstances towards Akhundzada and Haqqani, the courtroom has thus issued a transparent precedent that persecuting LGBTQ individuals is a criminal offense towards humanity. For the primary time, a global tribunal is treating violence towards this neighborhood as one of many gravest crimes underneath worldwide legislation.
The ICC’s recognition of LGBTQ persecution as a criminal offense towards humanity marks a authorized breakthrough. The precedent will not be restricted to Taliban crimes—it reshapes the authorized panorama for a way worldwide legislation defines and prosecutes anti-queer violence globally.
This ruling opens the door for prosecutors all over the world to use the identical reasoning in different battle settings, together with in circumstances involving nonstate actors akin to militias, extremist teams, or de facto regimes. For instance, future investigations into abuses in locations akin to Chechnya, elements of the Sahel, or areas underneath the affect of the Islamic State can now explicitly embrace violence towards LGBTQ individuals as a part of a broader sample of gender-based persecution.
LGBTQ individuals have lengthy been persecuted in conflicts all over the world—with information relationship way back to World Struggle II. One of many first pogroms after Adolf Hitler took energy in Germany focused a company that promoted queer rights, facilitated scholarly analysis, and supplied gender-affirming medical care. From 1933 to 1945, the Nazis persecuted queer individuals, sending 1000’s to focus camps.
Extra just lately, in 2015, the Islamic State captured the world’s consideration when it executed males accused of homosexuality by throwing them off buildings in Syria and Iraq and issued demise warrants for lesbians. LGBTQ people in Colombia have confronted brutal, organized violence, together with rape, executions, pressured labor aimed toward “correcting” their identities, and focused assaults such because the proposed firebombing of homosexual institutions. In Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, LGBTQ people have been systematically focused by Russian forces—subjected to torture, imprisonment, and different types of gender persecution, together with being pressured to strip at checkpoints to disclose rainbow tattoos or homosexual relationship apps—acts that doubtless quantity to crimes towards humanity.
In fact, charging Taliban leaders with these crimes is simply the start of a protracted means of bringing them to justice. The ICC has no enforcement energy of its personal, which is one cause why so many query the worth of worldwide legislation to counter atrocities. For Taliban leaders to be dropped at trial, they’d first should be arrested. This might require them to journey exterior of Afghanistan and a overseas authorities to detain them, or for a regime to take energy in Afghanistan that might willingly hand them over to The Hague.
It’s fairly doable that Akhundzada and Haqqani might by no means be dropped at trial for these crimes. However that doesn’t imply that these costs don’t matter.
As a particular advisor to the ICC, I spent the previous three years engaged on this case and the previous two years assembly with queer Afghans who survived Taliban violence and managed to flee the nation. Navigating a maze of stigma, worry, and threat, these Afghans shared their tales at the same time as they confronted demise threats merely for present. So many survivors are terrified about what might occur to them and their households for talking up. Some stay terrified that they may nonetheless be pressured to return to Afghanistan and bear extra violence from their neighborhood and the Taliban.
These warrants sign an vital message to victims all over the world: What the Taliban has accomplished to LGBTQ individuals is incorrect. It’s a crime. And it isn’t only a crime towards particular person victims. The persecution of queer individuals is a criminal offense towards humanity—one which violates the dignity and safety that everybody is entitled to—and it’ll now not go unchallenged.
The ICC arrest warrants should not nearly Afghanistan—they’re a warning to all regimes that terrorize LGBTQ individuals, whether or not these individuals are residents in Uganda or individuals residing underneath Russian management in occupied Ukraine territories.
These warrants additionally really feel important to me as a queer American at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is emboldening the rising campaign towards LGBTQ individuals in america. One in all Trump’s first acts in workplace was to challenge an government order declaring that the federal authorities doesn’t acknowledge transgender and intersex individuals. The administration launched an investigation into suppliers of gender-affirming take care of trans youth, resulting in hospitals across the nation to roll again or ban such care altogether. It additionally threatened to chop federal funding for teen being pregnant prevention packages that embrace LGBTQ youth.
Concurrently, the Trump administration has additionally imposed sanctions towards the ICC prosecutor and 4 judges. These sanctions—usually reserved for struggle criminals and terrorists—undermine the legitimacy of the highest courtroom and ship a chilling message to different worldwide establishments searching for to carry highly effective states accountable. Extra broadly, this motion alerts a rejection of multilateral norms and weakens the worldwide framework for implementing worldwide human rights legislation.
Even within the face of unprecedented repression, the ICC’s warrants towards the Taliban are a reminder that the LGBTQ neighborhood has allies all over the world when our leaders have turned towards us.
By ordering the arrest of Akhundzada and Haqqani for crimes towards humanity, the ICC is taking up the forces of hate and repression. On this harmful second, it ought to strengthen the resolve of all of us engaged within the battle for justice.
