A group of Afghan and Canadian activists marked the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power with a protest in front of the Canadian Parliament. They called on the Canadian government and the international community to recognize the Taliban’s policies against Afghan women as “crimes against humanity.”
The protesters stressed that gender apartheid must be defined and recognized in national laws and international frameworks, including the United Nations Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. They urged countries to take concrete steps to implement the International Criminal Court’s ruling on the arrest of the Taliban’s leader and chief justice, and to refrain from any normalization of relations with the group.
Chanting slogans such as “Afghan women are resisting, the world must resist too,” the protesters emphasized that the Taliban’s policies—banning girls’ education, barring women from work, excluding them from public life, and arresting them for violating mandatory hijab—are clear examples of gender apartheid. According to them, dozens of women have been arrested in the past month alone for “failing to comply with mandatory hijab.”
Afghan and Canadian women activists also rejected the Taliban’s claim that their restrictions on women are rooted in Afghan culture, calling such measures a political tool to control and eliminate women from society. Citing UN reports and legal experts from the organization, they stressed that the time has come for governments to take serious action against these policies.
