In 1998, the Rome Statute codified rape, sexual slavery, and compelled being pregnant as crimes towards humanity, making strides in worldwide felony regulation’s remedy of crimes towards girls. But greater than twenty years later, the Statute stays silent on an emergent system of oppression: from Afghanistan to Iran, governments should not merely discriminating towards girls, they’re governing via a scientific and institutionalised regime of gender-based domination. This regime—the place state regulation and bureaucratic infrastructure are weaponised to exclude girls from training, employment, public life, and bodily autonomy—will not be incidental. It’s deliberate, structural, and enduring. That is gender apartheid: an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one gender over one other.
Gender apartheid is comparable in its kind and impact to the racial apartheid as soon as prosecuted in South Africa. Racial apartheid is now recognised as a jus cogens norm—a peremptory rule of worldwide regulation from which no derogation is permitted.
Nevertheless, gender apartheid has no outlined standing below worldwide felony regulation, regardless of rising recognition as a structural regime of oppression. Whereas the Rome Statute prohibits gender-based persecution below Article 7(1)(h), this provision addresses focused acts linked to different crimes reasonably than regimes of governance constructed on structural gender domination. The Statute defines apartheid solely when it comes to race below Article 7(1)(j), leaving a vital doctrinal hole for addressing gender apartheid as a standalone crime towards humanity.
This weblog publish argues that worldwide felony regulation—not human rights regulation—is the mandatory authorized regime to confront gender apartheid, and that the Rome Statute should evolve to call and prosecute it. Codifying gender apartheid will not be merely a symbolic act. It might fill a prosecutorial void, recognise the structural nature of gender-based oppression, and affirm that gender domination—like racial domination—is against the law towards humanity. In doing so, it might carry the Rome Statute into nearer alignment with the precept of equality that underpins its object and objective.
Authorized Definition and Parallels to Racial Apartheid
To codify gender apartheid below worldwide felony regulation, we should first outline it in authorized phrases. As presently understood by jurists, students, and human rights our bodies, gender apartheid refers to an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one gender over one other, most frequently by males over girls and women, via the instrumental use of state regulation, coverage, and coercive constructions. It isn’t merely a collection of discriminatory acts, however a system of governance during which subordination is sustained via authorized design and enforced via state establishments.
This idea finds an analogue within the current authorized definition of apartheid below the Rome Statute Article 7(1)(h), which characterises apartheid as against the law towards humanity involving ‘an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group or teams and dedicated with the intention of sustaining that regime.’
Whereas the Statute restricts this provision to racial teams, nothing within the logic of the crime itself necessitates that limitation. Certainly, the 1973 Worldwide Conference on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (Apartheid Conference) defines apartheid as encompassing ‘related insurance policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa,’ however doesn’t expressly preclude analogous regimes based mostly on gender or different id classes. Article II of the Apartheid Conference outlines strategies of domination—legislative measures, arbitrary arrest, and denial of primary freedoms—which can be disturbingly acquainted in gender-based contexts.
Gender-based regimes of domination are more and more understood to reflect the authorized structure of racial apartheid. But gendered harms usually stay ‘formally invisible’ inside authorized frameworks that have been by no means designed to recognise systemic subordination. When apartheid is racial, the authorized construction is uncovered. When it’s gendered, the regulation itself turns into the mechanism that conceals it. Regardless of this parallel, worldwide felony regulation has but to meaningfully have interaction with gender apartheid as a definite mode of persecution.
Whereas the ICC has taken significant steps to handle gender-based harms—most notably via the Workplace of the Prosecutor’s 2014 Coverage Paper on Sexual and Gender-Primarily based Crimes—its present authorized and prosecutorial framework stays rooted in classes reminiscent of sexual violence and persecution. These frameworks, whereas important, don’t totally seize state-led techniques of gender-based governance designed to exclude and subordinate girls. Gender apartheid, as a structural mode of domination, calls for recognition as a standalone crime past the prevailing interpretive scope of the Rome Statute.
This hole creates a doctrinal silence: the Rome Statute, whereas expansive in its recognition of sexual and gender-based violence, lacks a class to seize governance techniques that organise round gender-based exclusion as a mode of rule. This leaves prosecutors and victims alike with out the authorized vocabulary to explain, not to mention prosecute, governments that intentionally and structurally exclude girls from public life.
Why Worldwide Prison Regulation—Not Human Rights Regulation—Is the Proper Framework
Worldwide human rights regulation offers vital normative protections for ladies and women. Devices such because the Conference on the Elimination of All Types of Discrimination In opposition to Girls(CEDAW, Articles 2 and 5) and the Worldwide Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, Articles 2(1), 3, and 26) obligate states to stop, examine, and redress gender-based discrimination.
Nevertheless, human rights treaty mechanisms are principally dialogic, not punitive: CEDAW and related treaty our bodies perform via dialogue with states, issuing non-binding observations and suggestions, however lack coercive authority to implement compliance. These devices are designed to watch and affect state conduct via dialogue to diplomats or different state officers, to not prosecute particular person perpetrators. That is why human rights frameworks fall brief in holding people or regimes criminally accountable.
In contrast, worldwide felony regulation shifts the axis of accountability from states to people, and from violation to criminality. It establishes that sure types of hurt—when systematic, structural, and intentional—should not merely breaches of human rights obligations, however crimes towards humanity.
Codifying gender apartheid throughout the Rome Statute would subsequently do what human rights regimes can’t: assign private felony accountability to those that design, implement, and maintain gender-based techniques of oppression.
This distinction will not be merely theoretical. Think about the case of racial apartheid in South Africa. Whereas condemned below human rights treaties for many years, it was solely via felony accountability—below each home and common jurisdiction frameworks—that the regime’s architects have been legally uncovered. The Rome Statute’s recognition of apartheid as against the law towards humanity was grounded within the understanding that sure types of state-organised domination should be met not solely with ethical rejection however with authorized punishment.
Furthermore, the Rome Statute already incorporates the instruments for such an enlargement. Article 21(3) mandates that the Statute be interpreted and utilized constantly with internationally recognised human rights norms, together with the precept of non-discrimination. And whereas Article 7(1)(h) prohibits gender-based persecution, it doesn’t attain the structural dimension of governance regimes that organise public life across the subordination of girls.
Persecution requires a connection to different crimes and sometimes arises within the context of battle. Apartheid, against this, captures techniques of oppression as crimes in themselves, even in peacetime. It’s this authorized framing of domination as a standalone felony mistaken that’s lacking from present gender provisions below the Statute. Codifying gender apartheid as a world crime would shut this conceptual and prosecutorial hole.
Techniques of Domination: Gender Apartheid in Apply
Whereas the time period ‘gender apartheid’ will not be but codified in worldwide felony regulation, its manifestation in state governance is neither summary nor speculative. In a number of jurisdictions, gender subordination will not be merely tolerated—it’s intentionally constructed and enforced via regulation. These should not circumstances of sporadic discrimination; they’re examples of state-organised techniques of gender-based domination, bearing the hallmark options of apartheid as understood in worldwide authorized doctrine.
Afghanistan: A Totalising Regime of Gender-Primarily based Erasure
For the reason that Taliban’s return to energy in 2021, Afghanistan has turn out to be essentially the most paradigmatic case of gender apartheid within the twenty-first century. In lower than three years, the regime has issued greater than 100 edicts dismantling girls’s entry to training, employment, freedom of motion, public house, and bodily autonomy. Ladies are barred from secondary faculties and universities; girls are prohibited from working for NGOs and most authorities places of work; they’re banned from parks, gyms, and even long-distance journey and not using a male guardian. These edicts should not disconnected insurance policies. They characterize an institutional ideology during which the state’s perform is inseparable from the subordination of girls.
As UN Particular Rapporteur Richard Bennett reported in June 2024, the Taliban’s system of governance constitutes a system of institutionalised and systematic discrimination and oppression that ‘could quantity to gender apartheid.’ The Afghan Unbiased Human Rights Fee, Amnesty Worldwide, and UN have likewise urged the worldwide authorized group to recognise this regime not merely as discriminatory however as structurally and ideologically gendered in a way akin to apartheid. The size and intentionality of the exclusions—executed via official decrees and backed by regulation enforcement—exhibit that this isn’t simply human rights abuse. It’s state-led authorized subjugation.
Iran: The Regulation as a Device of Gendered Repression
Within the Islamic Republic of Iran, the state’s authorized equipment is likewise central to the management and subordination of girls (see commentary right here and right here). The morality police, tasked with implementing obligatory veiling and modesty codes, function as a quasi-military pressure rooted in statutory authority. Girls’s gown, conduct, and mobility are regulated not simply by customized however by codified regulation, with punishments starting from fines to detention to bodily violence.
The dying of Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022 whereas in custody of the morality police sparked a worldwide rebellion—nevertheless it additionally underscored the legalisation of gender management within the Iranian state. In 2024 and 2025, the UN Truth-Discovering Mission on Iran concluded that the state’s authorized framework, together with felony penalties for dress-code violations and restrictions on girls’s political participation, constitutes a sustained equipment of repression. The Mission’s findings recommend that Iran’s insurance policies should not advert hoc however structural: the regulation itself is wielded to outline, include, and subordinate the position of girls in society.
The Iranian case complicates narratives that see gender apartheid solely in theocratic or extremist regimes. Right here, a complicated state employs regulation, surveillance, and policing to entrench gender hierarchies. The authorized scaffolding could differ in look from that of the Taliban, however the final result—systemic gender domination by design—is disturbingly related.
Saudi Arabia: Reform with out Dismantling
Saudi Arabia has made incremental reforms to its male guardianship system in recent times, lifting some journey restrictions and allowing girls to drive. Nevertheless, beneath the floor, a deeply embedded authorized regime of gender management persists. Girls nonetheless face authorized and sensible obstacles in accessing healthcare, marrying, or submitting authorized claims and not using a male guardian’s permission. Regardless of state narratives of modernisation, authorized infrastructure continues to mirror a worldview during which male authority over girls will not be solely normative however legally enforced.
Worldwide our bodies have famous that reforms in Saudi Arabia haven’t eradicated the gender-based authorized hierarchy, however merely softened its expression. The persistence of statutory guardianship, private standing legal guidelines favoring males, and gender-based restrictions within the justice system collectively kind a state-sponsored regime of inequality that limits girls’s autonomy not by the way, however structurally. On this means, Saudi Arabia illustrates how gender apartheid can endure even below the guise of reform, when the authorized basis of gender domination stays intact.
Conclusion
The examples of Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia expose gender apartheid not as episodic abuse, however as a structural mode of governance. But with out codification, worldwide felony regulation stays silent within the face of systemic gender domination. The Rome Statute’s definition of apartheid should evolve past race to mirror up to date realities of oppression. Article 21(3) already requires gender-equal interpretation; codifying gender apartheid would fulfill that mandate and empower future ICC prosecutions. Simply as racial apartheid demanded authorized recognition to finish impunity, so too should gender apartheid be named, outlined, and prosecuted as against the law towards humanity below worldwide felony regulation.
Axana Soltan JD, LLM, MPP is a world lawyer specialising in worldwide felony regulation, human rights and gender justice, and is on the forefront of attempting to codify gender apartheid as against the law towards humanity. She is a Eisenhower Scholar (2025) on the College of Oxford, a Human Rights Fellow at Brown College, and presently serves as a Authorized Fellow on the UN Workplace of the Excessive Commissioner.
