Advancing justice where law has remained silent

The world’s first independent legal institute dedicated to the codification of gender apartheid.

What we Do

The Gender Apartheid Law Institute is an independent legal research center dedicated to advancing the recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity. Through rigorous scholarship, strategic advocacy, and global partnerships, the Institute works to define, codify, and enforce legal protections against gender-based systems of domination and exclusion.

Our Core Focus Areas

Definition & Codification

Advancing the legal framework required to recognize gender apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity. We convene jurists, scholars, and practitioners to refine the conceptual elements of gender apartheid under international criminal law. Through comparative legal analysis and expert consultation, the Institute contributes to the drafting of a definition capable of guiding future jurisprudence and accountability efforts.

Accountability & Enforcement

Strengthening mechanisms to ensure justice and accountability for acts amounting to gender apartheid.
This work stream examines existing international and domestic avenues for prosecution, supports strategic legal interventions, and promotes the integration of gender apartheid within broader accountability frameworks. The goal is to make the prohibition of gender apartheid not only normative, but enforceable.

Education & Global Engagement

Fostering informed dialogue, public understanding, and leadership on gender-based systems of exclusion.
Through research dissemination, educational programming, and global partnerships, the Institute deepens understanding of gender apartheid as a structural form of oppression. This pillar bridges academic inquiry with practical advocacy, cultivating the next generation of leaders advancing gender justice.

Honorary Advisory Board

Latest News & Opinion Editorials

We will attach links to recent news:

Closing the Rome Statute's Gender Gap: Why Gender Apartheid Demands Codification

In 1998, the Rome Statute codified rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy as crimes against humanity, making strides in international criminal law’s treatment of crimes against women. Yet more than two decades later, the Statute remains silent on an emergent system of oppression: from Afghanistan to Iran, governments are not merely discriminating against women, they are governing through a systematic and institutionalised regime of gender-based domination. This regime—where state law and bureaucratic infrastructure are weaponised to exclude women from education, employment, public life, and bodily autonomy—is not incidental. It is deliberate, structural, and enduring. This is gender apartheid: an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one gender over another.

From Persecution to Apartheid: The ICC’s Next Legal Frontier for Women’s Rights

[Axana Soltan is a U.S. Eisenhower Scholar at the University of Oxford and a Global Affiliate of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She is an international lawyer and legal scholar.]

In July 2025, the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber II issued arrest warrants for Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani on charges of crimes against humanity, including persecution on gender grounds. Three months later, on 8 October 2025, the People’s Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan—convened by a coalition of Afghan civil-society organisations—heard testimony from Afghan women and girls and examined evidence framing the Taliban’s rule as a system of gender persecution amounting to gender apartheid.

Events & Highlights

In July 2025, a high level panel was hosted at Oxford University, where we spoke of feminism and gender apartheid.

Our Director spoke of Afghan girls in her speech on international courts at Oxford Union