How Security Council Politics Trample Women’s Rights

By: Hasina Jalal

Published by: The National Interest
October 21, 2025

The situation facing Afghan women and girls is a test of our shared commitment to human rights, justice, and equality.

While world leaders gathered in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) under the banner “Better Together: 80 Years and More for Peace, Development, and Human Rights,” Afghan women and girls remain heartbreakingly absent from the promise of inclusion and justice. Under the current Afghan regime, they are barred from secondary and higher education, prohibited from working in most sectors, excluded from public life, and denied access to healthcare and communal spaces. Their freedom of movement, assembly, and expression are tightly restricted under a regime that has institutionalized gender-based oppression, amounting to a system that subjugates women and girls solely based on their sex.

Despite decades of global commitments to human rights, justice, and development, the international community’s response to Afghanistan’s crisis remains limited. The Security Council’s broader fragmentation and the absence of coordinated international action have left Afghan women abandoned at the margins of global concern. What can be done?

Security Council Politics

Over the past four years, since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, I have had the opportunity to engage closely with the United Nations in New York—participating in high-level convenings hosted by UN Women, meeting with the Permanent Mission of Afghanistan, and holding direct conversations with key representatives of UN member states. In parallel, I have actively contributed to multiple Afghan women-led civil society and transnational advocacy networks, working tirelessly to identify pathways toward justice and dignity for Afghan women in their current state of crisis.

In numerous engagements with permanent representatives from various countries, we have been told that meaningful efforts to confront gender apartheid in Afghanistan are routinely obstructed or watered down due to the looming threat of vetoes from Russia and China within the Security Council. They have also repeatedly resisted the inclusion of terms such as women’s rights, gender, and human rights in official council documents. This ongoing deadlock and lack of consensus have severely weakened the Security Council’s ability to exert meaningful pressure in defense of Afghan women’s rights, leaving millions trapped in a system of institutionalized discrimination with little recourse at the highest levels of international decision-making. To justify their reluctance to coordinate action, member states frequently invoke the concepts of sovereignty and non-interference, regional stability, and cultural relativism. But they are fallacies that sideline Afghan women and expose the selective morality of the politicians invoking them.

The Regional Stability Fallacy

Following the Taliban’s takeover, Russia and China have made individual and joint statements at the UN Security Council advocating for prioritizing regional security, stability, and counterterrorism initiatives as central to Afghanistan policy, effectively pushing human rights and human security aside. China has expressly emphasized this approach: “Women’s rights and interests are not the entirety of the Afghan issue, nor the core or root cause of the issue.”

This approach is particularly problematic in the case of Afghanistan because it sidelines the urgent human rights and humanitarian crises facing Afghan citizens, especially women and girls, under Taliban rule. By prioritizing security and counterterrorism above all else, Moscow and Beijing invert the proper relationship between human rights and security, implying that stability can exist independently of rights. Research shows when individuals and communities are denied basic rights, social trust erodes and long-term political instability is exacerbated. Hence, the adoption of human rights is a precondition for genuine security because security that ignores fundamental rights is inherently unstable. And in the case of Afghanistan, this approach threatens regional security and stability by creating conditions for cross-border extremism, mass refugee flows, economic disruption, and weakened cooperation on counterterrorism.

The Cultural Relativism Fallacy

As someone born and living in Afghanistan until college, I proudly consider myself a product of the country’s rich potential. My formal education began in 2001, following international intervention, when I started benefiting from free public schooling, healthcare, and equal rights alongside my male peers. What is happening now is not a reflection of Afghan culture, but a betrayal of it.

The Afghanistan I grew up in was not defined by oppression; it was shaped by resilience, progress, and the belief that women belonged in classrooms, offices, and public spaces. Those who claim that Afghan culture inherently demands the exclusion of women from education, employment, or even the simple act of walking in a park or visiting a grave are distorting reality. Such claims are not only false—they are dangerous. They allow global powers to hide behind cultural relativism as a justification for their silence, their lack of coordinated action, and their failure to confront the gender apartheid imposed by the Taliban. This misuse of cultural narratives erases the lived experiences of millions of Afghan women and girls, and it enables a global complacency that deepens their suffering.

Cultural relativism has long been used to justify human rights violations, often serving as a shield for oppressive regimes to deflect international scrutiny. From apartheid in South Africa to the persecution of minorities in Myanmar, governments have invoked local values or cultural/religious norms to resist accountability and challenge the universality of human rights.

While Moscow sees human rights as Western propaganda, hypocritical, destabilizing, or colonial imposition, for Beijing, the protection and advancement of human rights can only be done “in light of national conditions,” meaning that human rights should be interpreted and implemented based on a country’s specific political, cultural, and economic context rather than following universal standards. These approaches challenge the universality of human rights and leave space for the misuse of the interpretation of “national conditions.” This misuse of relativist arguments undermines the foundational principles of international law and enables selective silence in the face of systemic abuse.

The Way Forward

Unless all five permanent members of the UN Security Council reach a unified consensus to take decisive action against gender apartheid in Afghanistan, the suffering of Afghan women will remain sidelined. Without such alignment, the UN cannot meaningfully elevate its cause at the highest levels of decision-making, and transformative change will remain out of reach. To break this deadlock, the following urgent steps must be taken:

1. Encourage General Assembly-led initiatives when Security Council consensus fails: Use the UNGA’s moral authority to pass resolutions, convene special sessions, and mobilize global support for Afghan women’s rights.
2. Reframe gender apartheid as a core regional security issue: Gender justice must be treated not as a peripheral concern, but as central to regional and global stability.
3. Facilitate partnerships with regional actors committed to human rights: Engage neighboring countries and regional institutions that uphold gender equality to build collective pressure and promote rights-based models of engagement with Afghanistan.
4. Strengthen UN resolutions with clear mandates and accountability mechanisms: Avoid vague language that weakens enforcement and allows member states to sidestep responsibility.
5. Establish a dedicated UN trust fund for Afghan women and girls: Channel resources directly to women-led civil society organizations, educators, and grassroots movements operating within and outside Afghanistan.
6. Establish a caucus on gender apartheid in Afghanistan: Create an inclusive group representing Afghan women, youth, and marginalized voices to coordinate international advocacy and policy engagement. This caucus would provide regular briefings to the UN Security Council and UNGA, institutionalizing a platform for Afghan youth, activists, and experts to share their lived experiences and ensure that global decision-making is informed by the realities of those most affected.

The situation facing Afghan women and girls is not a distant issue; rather, it is a test of our shared commitment to human rights, justice, and equality.

About the Author: Hasina Jalal

Hasina Jalal is a member of the New University in Exile Consortium. She is also an Agora Fellow at the Center for Governance and Markets and a PhD candidate in Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in comparative politics and security studies. She previously held senior policy roles in the Government of Afghanistan, including Policy Advisor to the Minister and Director of Program Design at the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, and Research Team Lead at the Administrative Office of the President.