The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, said yesterday he was seeking arrest warrants for the head of the Taliban, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan’s chief justice for their “unprecedented” persecution of women and girls, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, in the country. (New York Times)

Earlier this week, Italian police detained Osama Elmasry Njeem, the director of several infamous prisons in Libya, under an arrest warrant from the ICC, which suspects him of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Two days after his arrest on Sunday, though, Italy released Njeem and escorted him back to Libya, a move the ICC has denounced. (Reuters)

The ICC’s request for arrest warrants against the Taliban leaders comes after a yearslong campaign by human rights activists calling for recognition of “gender apartheid” as a crime under the court’s jurisdiction. Though Khan’s statement requesting the warrants doesn’t use that term specifically, it is the first time that an ICC case has been built specifically around gender persecution, which is listed as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute that established the ICC’s jurisdiction.

Regardless of the terminology used, Khan’s statement underscores the extreme lengths to which the Taliban have gone to exclude women and girls from public life since taking over in Afghanistan in 2021. Among the increasingly repressive regulations they have implemented, women are now confined to their homes except for “urgent matters,” and while in public they are prohibited from singing, speaking loudly or laughing. As Hilary Matfess noted last month for WPR, while women bear the brunt of gender apartheid, the Taliban also regulate men’s behavior, as their policies promote narrow and unrealistic gender expectations.

In addition to broadening the court’s focus in terms of the crime they target, these arrest warrants also underscore the ICC’s widened geographic focus since Khan took over as chief prosecutor in 2021. Until just a few years ago, almost all of the cases brought by the ICC were against heads of state and conflict actors in Africa, fueling accusations of bias. Khan has bucked that trend, while also expanding the court’s ambitions to more powerful states, by issuing arrest warrants in recent years for the leaders of Russia and Israel.

Of course, requesting arrest warrants for two Taliban leaders is not going to remedy the situation for Afghan women and girls, which will require significant political change in the country. But in theory it does limit Akhundzada’s ability to travel to states that are signatories of the Rome Statute, which could complicate Afghanistan’s ongoing efforts toward normalizing ties with the international community.

In practice, however, Akhundzada is known to be highly reclusive and therefore unlikely to travel abroad in any case. Moreover, ICC arrest warrants have a spotty record at limiting travel, as evidenced by the sequence of events in Italy earlier this week. Despite being a founding member of the ICC, Italy released Njeem from custody anyway. The Italian government claims it released him to avoid potential threats to Italian nationals in Libya. But observers have accused it of doing so to prevent tensions with Libya, which Rome relies on to counter migration from North Africa to Europe.