In early October last year, Shaharzad Akbar, an Afghan academic and women’s rights activist, sat in a large room at the Madrid Bar Association in Spain, alongside dozens of people, mostly women and mostly Afghan like her.
They had gathered for a singular purpose: a public hearing of the People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan, the first tribunal dedicated to addressing gender-based violence committed by the Taliban since the group regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021.
Since the takeover, the Taliban have severely restricted women’s rights and freedoms, banning them from higher education, most employment opportunities and public life, while imposing harsh restrictions on movement enforced through detention, torture and intimidation.
“I was sitting beside one of the survivors on the first day of the hearings. And even before her testimony, she was crying, and she was very emotional because of what she was hearing,” says Akbar, executive director of Rawadari, one of the human rights organisations that helped organise the tribunal.
Eventually, the anonymous witness gathered herself and delivered her testimony in a shaky but firm voice, an act undertaken at considerable personal risk. However, in later conversations, the witness told her how satisfying the experience was. Akbar recalls her relief, that it was satisfying to speak out and to imagine herself doing so in the International Criminal Court.
“It’s a moment of agency for them,” she explains, and that, Akbar says, was the idea behind holding a people’s tribunal. “We’re not hearing from experts. We are not hearing from lawyers. We are hearing from survivors directly.”
The Afghan tribunal is part of a growing phenomenon. Across the world, unofficial “people’s tribunals” are emerging as parallel systems of accountability for conflicts many believe formal international justice mechanisms are failing to adequately address.
Read full article on Wired
0
0