ICC issues arrest warrants for Taliban leaders for persecuting women and girls
In a statement, the ICC said that "while the Taliban have imposed certain rules and prohibitions on the population as a whole, they have specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms".The United Nations has previously described the restrictions as being tantamount to "gender apartheid". The Taliban government has said it respects women's rights in accordance with their interpretation of Afghan culture and Islamic law.Akhundzada became the supreme commander of the Taliban in 2016, and has been leader of the so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan since US-led forces left the country in August 2021. In the 1980s, he participated in Islamist groups fighting against the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan.Haqqani was a close associate of Taliban founder Mullah Omar and served as a negotiator on behalf of the Taliban during discussions with US representatives in 2020.
The ICC investigates and brings to justice those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, intervening when national authorities cannot or will not prosecute.However, it does not have its own police force and so relies on member states to carry out any arrests.The prospect of warrants being issued for the two Taliban leaders was first raised in January, when the ICC's top prosecutor, Karim Khan, alleged they were "criminally responsible for persecuting Afghan girls and women, as well as persons whom the Taliban perceived as not conforming with their ideological expectations of gender identity or expression, and persons whom the Taliban perceived as allies of girls and women".At the time, the Taliban's foreign ministry responded to the threat of arrests, saying the ICC had turned a blind eye to what it described as "numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by foreign forces and their local allies", referring to US-led forces present in the country before 2021.Human Rights Watch welcomed the arrest warrants for the two Taliban leaders. It called on the ICC "to extend the reach of justice to victims of other Taliban abuses, as well as victims of the Islamic State of Khorasan Province forces, former Afghan security forces and US personnel". "Addressing cycles of violence and impunity in Afghanistan requires that victims of all perpetrators have equal access to justice," it said in a statement.
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Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Afghan refugees stuck in Pakistan as Germany halts entry programme
BERLIN/ISLAMABAD, July 3 (Reuters) - In a cramped guesthouse in Pakistan's capital, 25-year-old Kimia spends her days sketching women — dancing, playing, resisting —in a notebook that holds what's left of her hopes. A visual artist and women's rights advocate, she fled Afghanistan in 2024 after being accepted on to a German humanitarian admission program aimed at Afghans considered at risk under the Taliban. A year later, Kimia is stuck in limbo. Thousands of kilometres away in Germany, an election in February where migration dominated public debate and a change of government in May resulted in the gradual suspension of the programme. Now the new centre-right coalition intends to close it. The situation echoes that of nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared to settle in the United States, but who then found themselves in limbo in January after U.S. President Donald Trump took office and suspended refugee programmes. Kimia's interview at the German embassy which she hoped would result in a flight to the country and the right to live there, was abruptly cancelled in April. Meanwhile, Germany pays for her room, meals and medical care in Islamabad. "All my life comes down to this interview," she told Reuters. She gave only her artist name for fear of reprisal. "We just want to find a place that is calm and safe," she said of herself and the other women at the guesthouse. The admission programme began in October 2022, intending to bring up to 1,000 Afghans per month to Germany who were deemed at risk because of their work in human rights, justice, politics or education, or due to their gender, religion or sexual orientation. However, fewer than 1,600 arrived in over two years due to holdups and the cancellation of flights. Today, around 2,400 Afghans are waiting to travel to Germany, the German foreign ministry said. Whether they will is unclear. NGOs say 17,000 more are in the early stages of selection and application under the now dormant scheme. The foreign ministry said entry to Germany through the program was suspended pending a government review, and the government will continue to care for and house those already in the program. It did not answer Reuters' questions on the number of cancelled interviews, or how long the suspension would last. Reuters spoke with eight Afghans living in Pakistan and Germany, migration lawyers and advocacy groups, who described the fate of the programme as part of a broader curb on Afghan asylum claims in Germany and an assumption that Sunni men in particular are not at risk under the Taliban. The German government says there is no specific policy of reducing the number of Afghan migrants. However, approval rates for Afghan asylum applicants dropped to 52% in early 2025, down from 74% in 2024, according to the Federal Migration Office (BAMF). Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Since May 2021 Germany has admitted about 36,500 vulnerable Afghans by various pathways including former local staff, the government said. Thorsten Frei, chief of staff to Germany's new chancellor Friedrich Merz, said humanitarian migration has now reached levels that "exceed the integration capacity of society." "As long as we have irregular and illegal migration to Germany, we simply cannot implement voluntary admission programs." The interior ministry said programs like the one for Afghans will be phased out and they are reviewing how to do so. Several Afghans are suing the government over the suspension. Matthias Lehnert, a lawyer representing them, said Germany could not simply suspend their admissions without certain conditions such as the person no longer being at risk. Since former chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany's borders in 2015 to over a million refugees, public sentiment has shifted, partly as a result of several deadly attacks by asylum seekers. The far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), capitalising on the anti-migrant sentiment, surged to a historic second-place finish in February's election. Afghans Reuters spoke with said they feared they were being unfairly associated with the perpetrators, and this was putting their own lives at risk if they had to return to Afghanistan. "I'm so sorry about those people who are injured or killed ... but it's not our fault," Kimia said. Afghan Mohammad Mojib Razayee, 30, flew to Germany from Cyprus in March under a European Union voluntary solidarity mechanism, after a year of waiting with 100 other refugees. He said he was at risk after criticising the Taliban. Two weeks after seeking asylum in Berlin, his application was rejected. He was shocked at the ruling. BAMF found no special protection needs in his case, a spokesperson said. "It's absurd — but not surprising. The decision-making process is simply about luck, good or bad," said Nicolas Chevreux, a legal advisor with AWO counseling center in Berlin. Chevreux said he believes Afghan asylum cases have been handled differently since mid-2024, after a mass stabbing at a rally in the city of Mannheim, in which six people were injured and a police officer was killed. An Afghan asylum seeker was charged and is awaiting trial. Spending most days in her room, surrounded by English and German textbooks, Kimia says returning to Afghanistan is unthinkable. Her art could make her a target. "If I go back, I can't follow my dreams - I can't work, I can't study. It's like you just breathe, but you don't live." Under Taliban rule, women are banned from most public life, face harassment by morality police if unaccompanied by a male guardian, and must follow strict dress codes, including face coverings. When security forces raided homes, Kimia said, she would frantically hide her artwork. The Taliban say they respect women's rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic law and local culture and that they are not targeting former foes. Hasseina, is a 35-year-old journalist and women's rights activist from Kabul who fled to Pakistan and was accepted as an applicant on to the German programme. Divorced and under threat from both the Taliban and her ex-husband's family, who she says have threatened to kill her and take her daughter, she said returning is not an option. The women are particularly alarmed as Pakistan is intensifying efforts to forcibly return Afghans. The country says its crackdown targets all undocumented foreigners for security reasons. Pakistan's foreign ministry did not respond to request for comment on how this affects Afghans awaiting German approval. The German foreign ministry has said it is aware of two families promised admission to Germany who were detained for deportation, and it was working with Pakistan authorities to stop this. Marina, 25, fled Afghanistan after being separated from her family. Her mother, a human rights lawyer, was able to get to Germany. Marina has been waiting in Pakistan to follow her for nearly two years with her baby. "My life is stuck, I want to go to Germany, I want to work, I want to contribute. Here I am feeling so useless," she said.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
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Trump has found a way to cut out China
Donald Trump is opening up a new frontier in his trade war. Despite striking a pact with China last month, the US president is threatening to reignite tensions with Beijing by entangling the entirety of Asia in a sprawling web of tariff deals. Even with fresh levies imposed on Japan and South Korea, Trump is racing to land a string of agreements across the continent, including with Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia. If he pulls that off, he will build a cage around Xi Jinping's ability to use Asian markets to prop up Beijing's strained export-driven economy. 'What we are witnessing is no passing trade war,' says Neil Shearing, an economist at Capital Economics. 'Rather, it is the manifestation of a deeper, more durable superpower rivalry between the world's two largest economies.' Already, Trump's trade pacts with Britain and Vietnam have set a template for his plan to weaken Beijing's trading power. The UK deal revealed tools for the White House to 'veto' Chinese investment in Britain, while the Vietnam agreement aims to stop Beijing from relying on a loophole to avoid US tariffs. Trump has achieved the latter by putting a 40pc levy on 'transshipments' – that is goods imported into Vietnam, mostly from China, and then re-exported to America. This new tariff is double the 20pc levy on Vietnamese-made goods, thereby sending a clear message to Hanoi. While Vietnam is welcome to export to the US if it can cope with a 20pc levy, Trump will come down on the country like a tonne of bricks if it replaces 'Made in Vietnam' stickers with 'Made in China'. The president has also since threatened other South East Asian countries with more aggressive tariffs unless they make a deal in the next three weeks. This includes a potential 25pc levy on Malaysia, 32pc on Indonesia and 36pc on Thailand and Cambodia. Trump's demands will certainly include Vietnam-style measures to increase the squeeze on China. Export-driven economy Trading figures clearly show why Vietnam has emerged as an early candidate for this strategy. Since Trump first came to power in 2017, China's machinery and electrical goods shipments to Vietnam have risen from about 17pc of its total exports to almost half. And since he returned to the White House this year, Vietnam's imports of these goods from China have jumped by almost a quarter. In the year to May, Vietnam imported $174bn (£129bn) of goods from China and exported $132bn to the US. The ebb and flow of these two figures tend to track each other remarkably closely. Exports to Asia are integral to Xi's attempt to keep China's economy expanding by at least 5pc a year. Beijing juices up GDP by pumping subsidies and investments into manufacturing. This is because Chinese households simply don't spend enough to allow consumption to power the economy. 'Whenever Chinese domestic spending growth sags, export growth accelerates,' says David Lubin, a senior research fellow at the think tank Chatham House. 'And that's simply because Chinese companies can't sell stuff domestically, so they sell it abroad.' At home, this economic model has led to overcapacity and oversupply, forcing businesses into damaging price wars. If these companies can't export their surplus to Asia, supply gluts appear inevitable. Yet, the escape valve remains open. Even though China's exports to the US have dropped more than 40pc from a year ago, its total exports worldwide have climbed by almost 5pc. That has included a 15pc increase in shipments to 10 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. But the pressure is building on China, as revealed in Beijing's strident reaction to the US-Vietnam trade deal. He Yongqian, the commerce ministry spokesman, branded it 'a typical act of unilateral bullying' and vowed that hostile deals would prompt China to 'take resolute countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests'. This demonstrates the unenviable position that Vietnam finds itself in, particularly as the US and China are its two largest trading partners. Picking sides Soon, other Asian economies might face an equally painful choice between the battling behemoths. Trump this week has shown he is unafraid to wield a big stick, wherever he thinks it might work. On Monday, he posted on his Truth Social platform that he would slap a new 10pc tariff on 'any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of Brics' – the ever-expanding group of countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. This came in response to a Brics summit in Brazil, which included not only the wider membership of Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the UAE, but also a new set of 'partners' from Latin America, Africa and central Asia – as well as Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. In a statement issued after the summit, the participating countries attacked 'the proliferation of trade-restrictive actions'. They didn't name the US, but said 'unilateral' measures could 'reduce global trade, disrupt global supply chains and introduce uncertainty into international economic and trade activities'. Speaking after Trump's post, Mao Ning, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said Brics was 'not a bloc for confrontation, nor does it target any country'. 'Tariffs should not be used as a tool for coercion and pressuring,' she said. 'Arbitrary tariff hikes serve no one's interest.' Beijing's approach is more carrot than stick. China presents itself, accurately or otherwise, as the friend of poorer countries and a defender of multilateral bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation. 'As a developing country and a member of the Global South, China breathes the same breath with other developing countries and pursues a shared future with them,' China's state news agency Xinhua recently quoted President Xi as saying. The incentives for developing countries to take China's side in the trade war include the $1 trillion-plus Belt and Road Initiative, which bankrolls global infrastructure projects, and more recently the Shanghai-headquartered New Development Bank, also known as 'the Brics Bank'. In Indonesia, which is scrambling to secure a trade deal with Trump, Beijing has also been in love-bomb mode. Last week, President Prabowo Subianto was on hand for the groundbreaking ceremony on a $6bn Chinese-Indonesian joint venture project to mine nickel and make batteries for electric vehicles. He called it 'colossal, an extraordinary breakthrough', which was no doubt music to Xi's ears. Beijing's response But the Chinese also seem ready to play hard-ball. With India potentially lining up to replace China as the main supplier of iPhones to America, reports surfaced in recent weeks that hundreds of mission-critical Chinese engineers and technicians at Taiwanese firm Foxconn's iPhone plants in India had been recalled to China. Bloomberg has reported that this is part of a broader move: Beijing has informally told companies and regulators to stop exporting key equipment, personnel and know-how to India and Southeast Asia – seemingly to stop multinationals such as Apple being able to shift operations out of China quickly. The Foxconn gambit was less blustery than a Trump tariff, but it shows that Xi is playing the game. And he has a huge head-start, says Chatham House's Lubin. China has been building almost unassailable positions in industries such as solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries and, most importantly, rare earths and magnets. This already shored up Beijing's hand in the trade talks with Trump, forcing him to back down from his most aggressive tariff threats. And it might help mitigate the impact of Trump's iron cage of trade deals. Lubin describes Xi's strategy as an 'asymmetric decoupling' from the US. 'The result of establishing China as a manufacturing powerhouse is to make the world more dependent on China,' he says. 'And that gives China leverage.' The question now is whether Xi's leverage – monopolies in key sectors, plus a shower of money for his Asian partners – is enough to combat Trump's ever-toughening tariff threats. That's the call Asian countries will now have to make.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
ICC issues warrant for Taliban's supreme leader for persecution of women
The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls. In a statement, the ICC said on Tuesday there were 'reasonable grounds to believe' the Taliban's supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan's chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had ordered policies that deprived women and girls of 'education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion'. Afghan human rights activists have called for the Taliban's system of depriving women and girls of rights and freedoms and enforcing segregation to be recognised as gender apartheid. Tahera Nasiri, an Afghan women's rights activist now living in Canada, said the arrest warrant was an acknowledgment of the abuses Afghan women faced. 'For four years, the Taliban have told us to stay silent, stay at home, cover our faces, give up our education, our voices and our dreams. Now, an international court is saying: 'Enough. This is a crime.' 'Even if Akhundzada and Haqqani never sit in court, they now carry the mark of international criminals,' she said. 'They are no longer just leaders of Afghanistan, they are wanted men.' The court said the alleged crimes had taken place since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021 until January 2025, when the ICC's chief prosecutor first sought the warrant. Since returning to power, the militant Islamists have banned women from paid work and girls from secondary education, as well as issuing a series of edicts that ban women from many areas of public life, including walking in parks and even speaking in public. Human rights groups have called on the international community to support the ICC in enforcing the arrest warrants. Liz Evenson, Human Rights Watch's international justice director, said: 'Senior Taliban leaders are now wanted men for their alleged persecution of women, girls, and gender non-conforming people.' In June, the UN accused the Taliban of removing legal protections for women and turning the justice system into a tool for entrenching an 'institutionalised system of gender oppression, persecution and domination'. The UN report also highlighted the suspension of a law on violence against women that included protections against rape and forced marriage. When announcing that he was seeking a warrant in January, the ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said the two leaders were 'criminally responsible' for gender-based persecution in Afghanistan and that he would also be seeking warrants for the arrest of other Taliban leaders. 'Our commitment to pursue accountability for gender-based crimes, including gender persecution, remains an absolute priority,' he said. Amnesty International has also called on the international community to recognise gender apartheid as a crime under international law. Parwana Ibrahimkhail Nijrabi, a former Taliban prisoner now living in Germany, said: 'Arresting these men won't be easy, especially with some countries still engaging with the Taliban. But I hope member states of the ICC take this seriously and act to arrest them.'
