The Constitutional Pal

Deportation & Gender Apartheid

Afghan refugees in Iran are being deported. It is refoulement. And that is a blatant breach of non-refoulement: a foundational, non-derogable principle of international refugee law. Under Article 33(1) of the 1951 Refugee Convention:

“No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

Iran is a signatory to this Convention. Sending Afghan refugees; many of whom are fleeing persecution by the Taliban [the de facto authority who is committing the unprecedented gender apartheid in the whole of history]; back to such zones is illegal. It is morally indefensible. It is inhumane. The international community must not look away. Human rights are not regional. Protection must not be selective. Silence in the face of refoulement is complicity.

There is no polite way to say this: our systems are failing. Not gently and definitely, no invisibly. Very violently, loudly, and with the full complicity of silence: The world is burning. And, Afghanistan is the ash heap we pretend not to see. While countries are at war, colonisers are colonising and raining death in the name of “security,” Afghanistan bleeds quietly in the corner, again.

700,000 returnees this year. $2,000 in aid per family that's been slashed to $156. 2.2 million Afghan girls banned from school. 420 health facilities shuttered.

This isn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It’s a policy failure, a moral failure, and most damningly an empathy failure! Children return to a country they do not know. Women return to a country that refuses to see them. And the world? The world returns to its meetings, to its donor fatigue, to its carefully worded communiqués.

Afghanistan and more importantly, Afghan women and girls, don’t need more sympathy. It needs action. Now. Fund the aid. Pressure the policy. Center Afghan women and girls. Stop normalizing apartheid in gendered form.

Read:

  1. Senior envoy warns Iran-Israel conflict is deepening crisis in Afghanistan
  2. Afghanistan: Surging returns from Iran overwhelm fragile support systems, UN agencies warn
  3. Afghan refugee families ‘return to a country they barely know’: UNHCR

#gender apartheid