Speaker: Professor Lisa Davis

International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors announced on 23 January that they are seeking ground-breaking arrest warrants for Taliban leaders Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, accusing them of crimes against humanity, specifically the persecution of women, girls, and for the first time ever, LGBTQI+ persons.

This webinar will discuss how the ICC warrants application responds directly to the Taliban’s severe deprivations of the rights and freedoms of women, girls and LGBTQI+ persons and those who support their rights since they regained control of Afghanistan in 2021.This talk will also discuss how banning secondary education for girls; promoting and committing forced marriages; raping, torturing and murdering women, lesbians, transpersons and gay men and arbitrarily detaining women protestors and journalists, are not isolated incidents. These acts are part of a broader pattern of systematic gender persecution, a crime against humanity and chargeable offense under international criminal law.

This event is open and free to the public,

About the speaker: Professor Lisa Davis

Lisa Davis is the Senior Associate Dean of Clinical Programs, Professor of Law at CUNY Law School. Professor Davis also serves as the Special Adviser on Gender and Other Discriminatory Crimes to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor. Davis formerly served as the ICC Special Adviser on Gender Persecution. In this role, Davis drafted the first-ever policy on the crime of gender persecution. Professor Davis has written and reported extensively on gender-based crimes and human rights issues in conflict and other crisis settings, including on women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights. Davis has testified before U.S. Congress, European Parliament, U.K. Parliament, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and several international human rights treaty bodies.

Chair: Dr Maria Varaki

Dr Maria Varaki is a Lecturer in International Law in the War Studies Department at King's College London. Before moving to London, she held research positions at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki and at the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was also an Assistant Professor of International Law at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Maria holds a PhD in International Law from the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway, Ireland, and two LLM degrees in International and Comparative Law from Tulane University and New York University School of Law. She is currently a Research Associate on the Three Generations of Digital Human Rights ERC project (2023-2028) at Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law.