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Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at accusations of gender-based crimes in Afghanistan, European military funding for Ukraine, and same-sex marriage in Thailand.
Path to Accountability
International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan announced on Thursday that he was seeking arrest warrants for two top Taliban leaders. Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani are accused of being “criminally responsible for persecuting Afghan girls and women” as well as those who do not follow the Taliban’s gender norms and those who are perceived to be allies of these individuals.
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at accusations of gender-based crimes in Afghanistan, European military funding for Ukraine, and same-sex marriage in Thailand.
Path to Accountability
International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan announced on Thursday that he was seeking arrest warrants for two top Taliban leaders. Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani are accused of being “criminally responsible for persecuting Afghan girls and women” as well as those who do not follow the Taliban’s gender norms and those who are perceived to be allies of these individuals.
Khan alleges that these crimes were committed from at least Aug. 15, 2021—when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan—to the present day. Those who oppose the Taliban’s gender rules have been “brutally repressed,” including via “murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts,” Khan added.
Since coming to power, the Taliban have systematically cracked down on women’s rights, including banning women from attending universities, closing secondary schools and beauty salons, requiring women to wear burqas, and criminalizing the act of women speaking in public. Last month, the Taliban ordered that all new buildings must be constructed so that women cannot be seen through the windows and all existing buildings with windows that overlook places where women usually convene must be walled or covered up. These places include kitchens, courtyards, and wells.
“This is the Taliban 2.0: an enterprise virtually indistinguishable from the original, under which Afghanistan became a failed state that threatened regional and international security in the late 1990s,” Kelley E. Currie and Amy K. Mitchell argued in Foreign Policy in 2022.
This is the first time that ICC prosecutors have publicly sought arrest warrants in relation to potential war crimes in Afghanistan. Now, a three-judge panel must determine whether to issue the warrants; this process usually takes around three months. If the court rules in favor, then it is up to individual member states to carry out the arrests as the ICC has no enforcement mechanism. Khan said his office plans to seek arrest warrants for other senior Taliban officials in the near future. The Taliban have not issued a comment over the ICC announcement.
“With no justice in sight in Afghanistan, the warrant requests offer an essential pathway to a measure of accountability,” said Liz Evenson, the international justice director at Human Rights Watch.
No country formally recognizes the Taliban; however, several nations (including Russia, China, and Pakistan) have established diplomatic relations with the group. A prisoner swap on Tuesday between the United States and the Taliban has the Afghan rulers hoping that a “normalization” of ties with Washington is in the works, though such a shift remains unlikely.
Today’s Most Read
What We’re Following
Davos warnings. Foreign leaders used the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday to caution against a Russian victory over Ukraine. NATO chief Mark Rutte warned on the summit’s sidelines that such an outcome would undermine the dissuasive force of the world’s largest military alliance and result in a loss of credibility that could cost NATO trillions of dollars in industrial production to reverse.
“We have to change the trajectory of the war,” Rutte said, urging NATO members to bolster their military aid to Ukraine. At the same time, he acknowledged that “Ukraine is closer to Europe than to the U.S.” and therefore European countries should bear the highest financial burden.
Rutte’s comments appear to be an effort to appease newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump, who has suggested freezing U.S. aid to Ukraine and called for Europe to bear more of the cost of Ukraine’s defense. At a virtual address to the forum on Thursday, Trump reiterated these concerns as well as warned of steep tariffs against the European Union to address a trade deficit.
Having previously criticized the failure of some NATO members to meet the alliance’s minimum defense spending requirement of 2 percent of GDP, Trump said he now wants NATO countries to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense. The United States spent 2.7 percent of its GDP on defense in 2024, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
Rainbow celebrations. Thailand on Thursday became the first Southeast Asian country to hold legal same-sex weddings. More than 1,000 couples filed marriage registrations, and a luxury retail mall in Bangkok held a mass wedding ceremony to mark the historic event.
“Equal marriage has truly become possible with the power of all,” former Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said on Thursday. Srettha was premier when the legislation passed last June, which introduced an amendment to a Thai civil code that changed the words “husband” and “wife” to “spouse.” This allowed same-sex couples to receive full legal, financial, and medical rights, including the ability to adopt children.
Investment promise. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Trump on Wednesday that he wants to broaden trade and investment with the United States to the tune of $600 billion over the next four years. The pledge comes just days after the new U.S. president said he would consider making Saudi Arabia the destination of his first foreign trip in return for substantial monetary promises.
According to a White House readout of the call, the two leaders also “discussed efforts to bring stability to the Middle East” as well as “trade and other opportunities to increase the mutual prosperity” of the two countries. At the World Economic Forum on Thursday, Trump said he planned to ask Riyadh and other OPEC members to “bring down the cost of oil.”
In recent years, the United States has decreased its dependence on Saudi oil. However, the kingdom remains the world’s biggest oil exporter, and the two countries maintain close trading partnerships for U.S.-made weapons and defense systems.
Odds and Ends
Thousands of botany enthusiasts flocked to a greenhouse in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens on Thursday to witness the unfurling of “Putricia,” a flower that emits a pungent odor akin to rotting garbage when it blooms. This is the first time that the Indonesia-native plant, which blooms once every few years for just 24 hours, has bloomed at the garden in 15 years. The endangered plant’s scientific name is Amorphophallus titanum, which translates as “large, misshapen penis,” and it’s known in Indonesia as bunga bangkai, or “corpse flower,” but the one in Sydney has (understandably) been more affectionately nicknamed Putricia—a portmanteau of “putrid” and “Patricia.”
“She’s really brought people together in an amazing way,” one visitor said of Putricia. “We want to smell it and say, ‘Yep, we’ve smelt that in our life.’”