The Taliban should know that we are watching what they do

Six weeks into the Taliban’s second shift as Afghanistan’s rulers, and the picture could not be bleaker. Bodies hang in public squares and women are banned from jobs. High schools are closed to girls, the women’s ministry has been replaced by a ministry for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, while former government officials, public servants, civil society activists, journalists and minorities are being targeted in a ruthlessly. Afghans rightly feel deserted by the international community, and betrayed by the US’s chaotic and deadly exit from their country.

Calls by human rights campaigners for an independent fact-finding mission to investigate abuses by all parties were growing louder even before the Taliban took over. Spurred by a spike in targeted killings, which worsened after the US-Taliban deal of February 2020, the push has taken on fresh urgency now.

Taliban officials speak of the resumption of executions and amputations as punishment, creating a “culture of impunity and an environment of fear,” Shaharzad Akbar, chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told an online forum on the sidelines of the latest UN Human Rights Council meeting. The Taliban are targeting former national security force members and their families, beating and torturing journalists, and erasing women from public spaces, Akbar said. There also have been forced evictions of Hazaras from their homes in several villages. “This is a really hopeless moment for Afghanistan,” she said. “In this moment of darkness we need member states to step in.”

The international community must work out a way to deliver aid to a population where as much as 97% are at risk of sinking below the poverty line.

But there is also more painstaking work to be done to document past and future abuses and reform the sanctions regime, which essentially operates outside the rule of law and without consistent humanitarian exemptions, says the UN’s special rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin.

“Afghanistan is ground zero of post-9/11 counter-terrorism and our experiment of trying to address the violence committed by non-state actors like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State,” Ní Aoláin told me. That has led to 20 years of systematic human rights abuses in Afghanistan, and not only by the Taliban; there were grave violations by the Afghan government and acts of torture and violence by the US-led coalition, she said.

Syria, with the Assad regime’s sustained human rights abuses and the myriad terror groups operating within its borders, may provide a possible way forward. After the failure of the UN Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism was born. Created by a UN General Assembly resolution in 2016, the mechanism, properly funded and with some heavy-hitting jurists on board, has been collecting, preserving and analyzing evidence of human rights violations in Syria with the aim of expediting criminal proceedings against perpetrators.

It’s already had some early success with the February sentencing in a German court of a former Syrian intelligence officer for complicity in crimes against humanity. In a separate action in July, a Syrian doctor was charged for his alleged role in torturing prisoners in military hospitals in Homs and Damascus. These are important advances for the principle of universal jurisdiction for such violations, which allows national courts to prosecute individuals for serious crimes against international law.

A similar body could be established on Afghanistan. Those who’ve been gathering evidence on the Taliban and other groups for 20 years will keep doing so. Along with the evacuation of many of those working in the field, a significant collection of human rights records has been safely taken out of Afghanistan that could aid investigations, Ní Aoláin said.

It’s even more important since the International Criminal Court announced last week the resumption of its Afghanistan investigation, which was welcomed by those seeking justice for victims. However, its clarification that it would prioritize alleged crimes committed by the Taliban and the local Islamic State affiliate over those perpetrated by US and other coalition troops and the Afghan National Security Forces was roundly condemned.

When decades of serious violations have taken place in Afghanistan, laying the seeds for accountability, for acknowledging to the victims what happened, who was killed and harmed by whom, can prove key to future endeavours to rein in impunity. It can also send a powerful message to the Taliban that their actions—not their words—are under a microscope, globally.

Ruth Pollard is a columnist with Bloomberg Opinion.