An International Declaration on Gender Apartheid and Its Destructive Consequences will formally launch August 13 with an online event hosted by Michigan Law.
The declaration aims to support the ongoing struggles of Afghan women and girls against systematic oppression by the Taliban, which has worsened since the group returned to power on August 15, 2021. The Taliban’s system of gender-based discrimination bars girls from attending school past the sixth grade, bans books by women, and keeps women out of the public sphere and most employment.
The declaration is the result of an extensive, 18-month process of wide-ranging global consultations led by international lawyers and Afghan women’s rights advocates—including an in-person convening at Michigan Law in September 2025.
The declaration calls for “the comprehensive use and development of international law” to end gender apartheid, including codification in the forthcoming Crimes against Humanity Convention and progressive interpretation of current international law to recognize its prohibition.
More than 50 of the world’s foremost experts in the fields of international law and women’s human rights have signed the declaration, including prominent Afghan advocates, Nobel laureates, former United Nations officials and experts, and former judges from some of the world’s leading national and international courts. The full text—available in English, Farsi, Pashto, and French—can be found here.
Organizers—who include Michigan Law professor Karima Bennoune, ’94, and Afghan women experts who visited the Law School over the last year to work on the project—see the declaration as a critical step to support the advocacy of women on the front lines. The declaration denounces complicity with perpetrators of gender apartheid and demands accountability as well as remedies for their victims and survivors.
“While this Declaration has broader global scope and the concept of gender apartheid has been used by women in numerous country contexts, the text is launched in August 2026, in particular, as a sign of solidarity and support for the Afghan women’s movement,” said Bennoune.
The online launch event from noon to 1:30 p.m. EDT on August 13 will be free and open to the public. Hosted by Michigan Law, it is co-sponsored by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, the Women and Children Research and Advocacy Network (WCRAN), the Network on the Elimination of Gender Apartheid (NEGA), the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), the University of Southern California Gould School of Law Gilbert Global Justice & Human Rights Center, and the Women in International Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law.
Featured speakers include:
- Zubaida Akbar, leading women’s rights and civil society activist from Afghanistan (chair)
- Manizha Bakhtari, ambassador and permanent representative of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to Vienna and International Organizations and former chief of staff of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- Zarqa Yaftali, founder and executive director of the Women and Children Research and Advocacy Network
- Davood Moradian, director general of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies.
- Hannah Garry, clinical professor of law and faculty director of the Gilbert Global Justice & Human Rights Center at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law
- Karima Bennoune, Lewis M. Simes Professor of Law at Michigan Law and former United Nations special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights
The event will also feature a video address from South African expert Penelope Andrews, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law and director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School, and former dean of the University of Cape Town Faculty of Law.
Banner caption: Afghan women take part in a protest in front of the Ministry of Education in Kabul on March 26, 2022, demanding that high schools be reopened for girls. (Photo by Ahmad SAHEL ARMAN / AFP via Getty Images)