KABUL: Afghanistan’s Taliban government said on Friday an arrest warrant sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its leaders was “politically motivated.”
It comes a day after the ICC chief prosecutor said he was seeking warrants against senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan over the persecution of women — a crime against humanity.
“Like many other decisions of the (ICC), it is devoid of a fair legal basis, is a matter of double standards and is politically motivated,” said a statement from the Foreign Ministry posted on social media platform X.
“It is regrettable that this institution has turned a blind eye to war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by foreign forces and their domestic allies during the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan.”
It said the court should “not attempt to impose a particular interpretation of human rights on the entire world and ignore the religious and national values of people of the rest of the world.”
The Taliban swept back to power in 2021 after ousting the American-backed government in a rapid but largely bloodless military takeover, imposing a severe interpretation of Islamic law, or sharia, on the population and heavily restricting all aspects of women’s lives.
Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister Mohammad Nabi Omari, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, said the ICC “can’t scare us.”
“If these were fair and true courts, they should have brought America to the court, because it is America that has caused wars, the issues of the world are caused by America,” he said at an event in eastern Khost city attended by an AFP journalist.
He said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should also be brought before the court over the country’s war in Gaza, which was sparked by Hamas’ attacks in October 2023.
The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister and three top Hamas leaders in November last year.
Afghanistan’s government claims it secures Afghan women’s rights under sharia, but many of its edicts are not followed in the rest of the Islamic world and have been condemned by Muslim leaders.
It is the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from education.
Women have been ordered to cover their hair and faces and wear all-covering Islamic dress, have been barred from parks and stopped from working in government offices.
ICC chief Karim Khan said there were reasonable grounds to suspect that Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani “bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds.”
Khan said Afghan women and girls, as well as the LGBTQ community, were facing “an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban.”
“Our action signals that the status quo for women and girls in Afghanistan is not acceptable,” Khan said.
ICC judges will now consider Khan’s application before deciding whether to issue the warrants, a process that could take weeks or even months.
The court, based in The Hague, was set up to rule on the world’s worst crimes, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It has no police force of its own and relies on its 125 member states to carry out its warrants — with mixed results.
In theory, this means that anyone subject to an ICC arrest warrant cannot travel to a member state for fear of being detained.
Khan warned he would soon be seeking additional arrest warrant applications for other Taliban officials.