Malala Yousafzai Honored for Her Efforts to Combat Gender Apartheid Ten Years After Receiving the Noble Peace Prize

A highlight for those of us who attended the American Society of International Law (ASIL) NYC gala to commemorate Human Rights Day last month was meeting Malala Yousafzai. As we move into 2025, we are taking one last peak in the rearview mirror at 2024 to draw inspiration for the fight ahead for women’s rights. Malala was only eleven when she began advocating for girls’ education and her right to learn under the Taliban’s rule in the Swat District of Pakistan. When she was fifteen, the Taliban targeted her in an attack meant to silence her voice and growing activism, and eight of her ten attackers were acquitted. In 2014, at seventeen, Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest Nobel laureate in the awards’ history. This past October 9—the date marking the twelve-year anniversary of the attack on her—the ASIL awarded Malala and her organization, the Malala Fund, the 2024 Champion of the International Rule of Law Award at their 2024 gala. Held at the New York City Bar Association, the event commemorated the work that Malala and her organization have pioneered—providing resources and investing in girls’ right to twelve years of education. The following day marked the tenth anniversary of the Norwegian-based Nobel Committee announcing Malala as the youngest recipient of its coveted Peace Prize. This was a highlight of 2024 for any of us who work on women’s human rights.

While Malala is from Pakistan, she has been a vocal advocate for girls’ education in both Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, where the Taliban returned to power in the aftermath of the United States’ 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. As Catherine Powell noted before, “Educating girls has clear benefits, first and foremost for girls themselves, but also for a variety of development indicators, from decreasing poverty to reducing extremism.” For decades, Afghan women have demanded the right to safe and equal opportunities under Taliban control. Efforts by not only Malala but also Afghan and Iranian women have brought into stark relief the need to powerfully conceptualize the Taliban’s brutal separation and subjugation of Afghan women as a new form of apartheid—gender apartheid —under international law. While these efforts began locally by Afghan women as far back as the 1980s, they are now getting international uptake.

Gender apartheid as a term began to be used in the 1980s by female scholars and advocates living in Muslim-majority countries, who criticized the systemic gender discrimination and conservative interpretation of sharia-based law that was seen in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Taliban government in Afghanistan at that time. Gender apartheid is based on the definition of racial apartheid—developed in apartheid-era South Africa—outlined as a crime against humanity in the 1974 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and under the 2002 Rome Statute. However, gender apartheid has no formal definition and is not covered by that Convention. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, has sought to define the framework of gender apartheid as “the commission of an inhumane act in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one gender group over another gender group or groups, with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

For the most part, Afghan women themselves are leading the charge in the effort to codify gender apartheid as an international crime. A delegation of Afghan women and other experts went to South Africa to learn from the legal and political strategies that framed that country’s anti-apartheid movement, how that anti-apartheid movement went global, and the intersectional dimensions of race and gender in apartheid. Afghan women are also tapping the expertise and support of advocates from around the world, who are now pushing for the codification of gender apartheid through avenues via international human rights and criminal law. The End Gender Apartheid campaign, established by human rights defenders, activists, and civil society—and which includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureates—aims to target international and national laws to expand the interpretation and definition of apartheid to encompass gender-based discrimination.

Most recently, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands have joined together to issue an initiative challenging the Taliban in the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) for violation of its commitments under the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Afghanistan will have six months from the time of issuing before official proceedings. Experts anticipate that even if the Taliban refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the ICJ case, this legal challenge may still succeed in deterring other countries signed on to CEDAW from formally engaging with and recognizing the Taliban’s Afghanistan. These steps have been supported by twenty-six additional countries and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

The push to amend the Rome Status to encompass gender apartheid is at the core of the gender apartheid movement. This codification would open the avenue to criminally investigate and prosecute offenders in the International Criminal Court. Activists are pushing to do this via attempts to amend the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity, commonly referred to as the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention. This treaty would outline measures for states to implement in their national laws to address crimes against humanity. By establishing a Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention, the definition of apartheid in the Rome Statute Article 7(1)(j) would be, in effect, further amended. This past February, the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls called for gender apartheid to be included in Article 2 of the draft articles. The articles are actively being considered by the UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee. “This recognition would not only honour the aim of the apartheid prohibitions in general but would also be a crucial step towards respecting and asserting the centrality of gender equality,” the UN working group noted. The UN announced it will facilitate a conference in 2026 to build on the 2019 draft articles.

With these legal pathways in place, the push to codify gender apartheid is as urgent as ever, given that the livelihoods of women and girls throughout the country continue to be at risk. At the recent ASIL 2024 gala, Malala noted:

“The Taliban are literally and metaphorically pointing guns at women. They’ve issued decrees limiting women’s rights, essentially trapping them in their homes. This is systematic oppression, not just discrimination. That’s why Afghan women activists are campaigning to codify gender apartheid into international law, so the Taliban can be held accountable for their crimes.”

Post by Catherine Powell and Noël James

https://www.cfr.org/blog/malala-yousafzai-honored-her-efforts-combat-gender-apartheid-ten-years-after-receiving-noble