It is time to recognize sex apartheid as a crime against humanity

The 69^th session of the Commission on the Status of Women is taking place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 11 to 22 March 2025. The main focus is an appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women 30 years ago.

The Platform for Action mentions twelve critical areas, including poverty, health, human rights, violence against women, and economic participation, all of which are grossly violated by the Islamic regime of Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Take violence against women, for example. These states—their laws, institutions, and policies—are the biggest perpetrators of violence against women. Women and girls face violence merely for the ‘crime’ of being a woman. Even before she speaks, her hair, her voice, her body, and her sexuality are acts of blasphemy and criminalised.

Apartheid goes beyond discrimination and persecution. It is an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination. Racial apartheid was the domination of one race over another and a system of white supremacy. It is long past time to recognise that sex apartheid exists, and it is the domination of one sex over another and a system of male supremacy.

A regime of sex apartheid controls ALL women and girls from puberty and even younger via unrelenting violence with the intent of controlling society. The hijab is a cornerstone of such regimes. In Iran, for example, Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code criminalises ‘improper’ veiling with up to two months’ imprisonment or up to 74 lashes. 32 state bodies are allocated a government budget to enforce the mandatory hijab. As if that was not enough, in the wake of the protests following Mahsa Jina Amini’s murder in 2022, a joint task force, named ‘Hijab-baan’ (the hijab watchers), was established. (See Sadr, S. (2024) Living as second class human beings: gender apartheid in the Islamic Republic of Iran). In South Africa, Bantustans (separate homelands for black people, supposedly to ‘preserve African culture’) were key to the regime of racial apartheid. Correspondingly, the hijab is key to ‘preserve women’s modesty’—and sex apartheid. The hijab is every woman and girl’s Bantustan, carried on her very back from the age of puberty till the day she dies or is killed.

Religion plays a central role in both racial and sex apartheid, though this is hardly ever mentioned. In South Africa, the Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church used the Bible to justify apartheid, while in Iran and Afghanistan, Islam is used, via the Quran and hadith, to justify sex apartheid. Noteworthy is that defenders of both forms of apartheid have utilised the same arguments—that apartheid was and is necessary to ‘protect the moral fabric of society.’ (The correct response to the use of religion to subjugate women, by the way, is not to say that ‘it is not Islam per se’ but to state clearly that no religion, culture, or belief can trump women’s rights.)

That the current chair of the Commission on the Status of Women is the Saudi government’s Abdulaziz Alwasil says much about the sorry state of affairs when it comes to the global response to women’s rights violations. International institutions like the UN have always reflected the male perspective when addressing women’s rights. For example, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women doesn’t condemn sex discrimination in the kind of forceful terms used in declarations and conventions dealing with racial discrimination and apartheid. It doesn’t use similar terms, like domination or oppression. And the UN Refugee Convention mentions five grounds for refugee status: race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, and the holding of a political opinion—but not sex.

Despite the explicit war on women in countries like Iran and Afghanistan, crimes against women have largely been seen as relevant only in the private sphere and women have often been blamed for any violence that they face. Like rape cases where the length of a woman’s skirt is blamed, so too any systematic misogyny is the result of a woman’s disobedience, immodesty, and not knowing her place. Cultural relativism is also often used as an excuse and justification.

If today there is a gradual recognition of sex apartheid as a crime against humanity, it is the result of a long struggle by women in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere protesting on the streets, not of machinations in the corridors of power or at the UN. If the view of sex apartheid as a crime against humanity has gained traction now, it is especially thanks to women’s revolutions in regions where women have been most oppressed. This includes Rojava, a feminist centre in the middle of a war zone in Syrian Kurdistan, a magnificent Woman, Life, Freedom revolution in Iran, and the confrontation of the Taliban by women in Afghanistan. The slogan Woman, Life, Freedom, first raised in Rojava, represents this new wave of women’s revolutions. It centres women in the fight in societies where women have been deemed sub-human and worth half that of men. It fights for life in societies ruled by death, and it calls for freedom under the most authoritarian regimes in the world.

In Iran, there is a Gen Z that is modern, secular, anti-clerical, and even anti-religious and doesn’t want an Islamic state. Women are supported by men who have come to understand that the liberation of society depends on women’s liberation. It is raining women’s revolutions, which is why a legal campaign to end gender apartheid is now being taken seriously. Under international law, racial apartheid is considered a crime against humanity and this campaign (which I am a signatory of) argues that the legal framework can be transposed to the sex apartheid context. It proposes an amendment modifying the definition to include sex (gender).

Whilst the focus of the campaign is on the law, it is that pressure from below that makes all the difference. This is not to say that changes in law aren’t important in the fight for civil rights, but that changes in law are the result of social and political movements. It is that groundswell of resistance at home and solidarity abroad that will make it impossible to ignore the calls to end the regimes of sex apartheid—as was the case with ending racial apartheid.

Related reading

No Hijab Day, 1 February: Confronting Misogyny, by Maryam Namazie

Feminism and religion are incompatible, by Maryam Namazie

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

A Small Light: Acts of Resistance in Afghanistan, by Zwan Mahmod

The Taliban’s unceasing war on Afghan women, by Khadija Khan

Iran and the UN’s betrayal of human rights, by Khadija Khan

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

The Silent Revolution Against Religious Oppression in Iran, by Siavash Shahabi

Golani’s Syria: Post-Assad nation-building hinges on resisting Islamisation, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Political Buddhism, bhikkhuni, and gender apartheid in Burma, by Hein Htet Kyaw