In recent conflicts, armed groups have strategically used violent attacks to deprive girls of their fundamental right to education, targeting girls’ schools, teachers, and students in order to sow terror and reshape society to conform with discriminatory and dehumanizing ideologies. Such attacks by the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and more cause unique, severe, and long-term harms to girls’ health and well-being. Yet these harms have thus far gone unaddressed by international humanitarian law, to the detriment of some of the most vulnerable victims of modern conflicts.

This Note argues that tribunals such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) must recognize that attacks to intentionally deprive girls of their right to education are gender-based persecution, and that such attacks should be recognized as a new crime against humanity. Drawing on the Taliban’s attacks against girls’ education in Afghanistan as a case study, it is clear that such targeted violence has severe negative consequences for the ability of girls to access their fundamental right to education. Key precedents in international law, particularly from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, support the assertion that attacks on girls’ education are sufficient to constitute the crime of gender-based persecution and to be considered an independent crime against humanity. The severe and lifelong harms that result from depriving girls of the right to education satisfy the gravity of harm threshold and are unique enough to recognize this “new” crime against humanity. While the ICC has yet to open a formal investigation into the Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan, armed groups in other countries have and continue to wage similar discriminatory attacks on girls’ education. In such situations, the ICC and other tribunals should seek to hold the perpetrators accountable for gender-based persecution and the crime against humanity of depriving girls of the right to education.

Continue reading Protecting Rights “In Small Places”: Why Depriving Girls of the Right to Education is Gender-Based Persecution and a Crime Against Humanity