There is a particular cruelty in being allowed to imagine a life while being denied the authority to pursue it. You can have ambitions, abilities, people who depend on you. Yet someone else claims the right to decide how much of that life you may actually live.
That is the human issue beneath the legal language in an 8AM Media report that the EU has said the Taliban’s gender discrimination may constitute a crime against humanity. The qualification matters: a reported assessment is not a judicial finding. The supplied reporting does not establish what legal action, if any, will follow.
Still, we need not wait for a legal conclusion before considering what it means to make a person’s choices conditional on their sex.
Much of ordinary life depends on being able to make plans that other people cannot casually cancel. Learning something difficult takes time. Work involves commitments. Relationships grow around expectations of a shared future. When permission can be withheld on the basis of who you are, uncertainty reaches into all of these things. The future becomes harder to build, even in the imagination.
There is a danger here for those watching from a distance. We can admire resilience so readily that we begin to treat it as an adequate answer to oppression. People find ways to endure; their resourcefulness deserves recognition. But endurance should never become the arrangement everyone else is content to leave them with. A person should be able to spend their ingenuity on something besides negotiating restrictions.
What, then, does concern require? Certainly some honesty about its limits. Reading a report and feeling appalled does not give us detailed knowledge of another person’s circumstances, or make every proposed intervention wise. It does give us reason to resist the comfortable habit of treating women’s freedom as a negotiable feature of somebody else’s society.
The lives at stake are not waiting to become significant through a legal ruling. They already contain unfinished work, attachments and possibilities. Any serious response has to keep those particular lives in view, including after the headline has disappeared.