Honourable senators, I rise today on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabeg Algonquin Nation to speak in support of Senator Ataullahjan’s Motion No. 139 that the Senate call on the Government of Canada to recognize the erasure of Afghan women and girls from public life as gender apartheid.

I rise today because the human rights of women and girls in Afghanistan are being severely trampled by the Taliban regime. Afghan women are being systematically squeezed out of active and meaningful participation in Afghan society. Their rights as citizens are being drastically curtailed. Hard-won gains that were made after the previous Taliban regime was toppled in 2001 are being rapidly rolled back, and the potential for any future enjoyment of women’s rights to participate and thrive politically, socially or economically is in danger. This is a catastrophe for Afghan women. This is a catastrophe for their nation which is suffering from the limits on women’s contributions. This is a catastrophe for all of us who believe that the human rights of all people, everywhere, must be protected.

Colleagues, I was drawn to speak to this motion because I support it and it is the right thing to do, but also because of some of my own first-hand experience.

As I mentioned last June when I spoke in support of Bill C-41, I travelled regularly to Afghanistan as a board member of the Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan. The economic emancipation of women was a key goal of our work.

Colleagues, I started my career in 1980 in the southern African country of Botswana during the dark period of apartheid experienced by our next-door neighbour South Africa. The tentacles of that brutal apartheid regime were far-reaching throughout our region.

This motion brings together these two professional and formative experiences of mine. It also, frankly, reminds me of our own Canadian human rights transgressions against the original peoples of this land and the long-lived dire consequences of legislated discrimination and suppression of human rights.

Honourable colleagues, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly as Resolution 217 on December 10, 1948, at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.

The commission was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and Canadian John Humphrey was the principal drafter of the declaration. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights commits nations to recognize all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, regardless of nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language or any other status.

Ironically, the same year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, apartheid was formally enacted in South Africa. One hundred and forty-eight apartheid laws were implemented over the 40 years that lasted, affecting every single aspect of people’s lives in that country. Whites put in place a system of White supremacy based on the exclusion of the majority Black population. The apartheid economy was built on racially based privilege, exclusion and segregation.

Apartheid, meaning “apartness” or “separate development,” regulated virtually every aspect of Black participation in the economy, residence and ownership, occupations, education and training, and health and welfare — and enforcement was brutal. While apartheid in South Africa was really more about money, power and fear than it was about religion, there was a stated Biblical case for it. I quote:

. . . the Bible taught that humankind, by the will of God, was separated into different races that should each have their own lands. . . .

The world is predicated on a number of unchanging creation “orders” . . . namely, the family, male leadership, the state, work, and race.

In South Africa, the divisions were White, Black, Coloured and Asian.

In Botswana, we had an influx of South African refugees. All were there seeking safety. Some, like Lindelwa Ntingana, the woman we named our Botswana-born daughter Lindi after, were there pursuing professional careers they would have been shut out of in their own country. Others were there for professional reasons and for reasons of love, like Mrs. Chetty, who taught our daughter Emilie. Mrs. Chetty was married to a man of another race.

Colleagues, when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and became the first democratically elected president of the new South Africa, the broad and deep damages of the apartheid regime were not automatically reversed. In fact, many persist as challenges today. With the recent passing of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, we were reminded of Canada’s leadership role in helping to bring other nations on board to end apartheid in South Africa.

Now, let’s turn to the situation at hand in Afghanistan. The Atlantic Council has stated that the peace agreement between the Taliban and the U.S.A., which led to U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, did not account for the concerns of Afghan women.

Despite initial agreements for modernization, the Taliban has been destroying the progress made in the last 20 years by Afghan women and girls toward a more gender-equal Afghanistan. Since coming to power, the Taliban has issued 80 decrees targeting women and girls, creating a systematically enforced gender apartheid in Afghanistan.

Where Black people in South Africa were relegated to remote Bantustans, suburban townships, the domestic servant quarters of their White bosses or prisons — if they didn’t comply with the laws of apartheid — women and girls in Afghanistan are prisoners in their own homes and inside their burkas, with very little right to free movement or to participation in the economy, in education, in politics or in public spaces. They too would end up in prison and/or brutally abused if they contravened the gender apartheid system imposed by the Taliban.

Honourable colleagues, the recognition that what is happening to women and girls in Afghanistan is, in fact, a form of apartheid is gaining support internationally. Article II of the 1976 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which responded to the situation in South Africa at the time, describes:

. . . inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them. . . .

These include:

(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person . . .

And:

(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups . . . basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country . . . the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. . . .

Colleagues, as you can see, there are stark parallels between the race-based apartheid of South Africa that this 1976 convention was responding to and the situation of gender apartheid today in Afghanistan.

Adapted from the international law on racial apartheid, gender apartheid emphasizes that discrimination has been made the system of governance itself such that the aim of government and public policy is to discriminate. As with apartheid in South Africa, there is also a stated, yet disputed, religious rationale for the system of gender apartheid in Afghanistan.

At last week’s panel on gender apartheid here in Ottawa, Akila Radhakrishnan of the Atlantic Council mentioned work being done on a brief to codify gender apartheid, and she indicated that momentum is growing internationally.

At that same panel, MP Garnett Genuis spoke of the importance of fully implementing Bill C-41. We now have humanitarian aid flowing to Afghanistan from Canadian NGOs, but the system is not yet in place for development assistance, which, as we know, is sorely needed.

MP Ali Ehsassi spoke about our feminist foreign policy and our ambassador for Women, Peace and Security as Canadian strengths in the face of gender apartheid in Afghanistan.

Colleagues, when I look back on my own experiences in Afghanistan with the Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan, to which Canada was the largest contributor, I think about the women who were taking out the microloans for their businesses at that time. In 2007, I remember visiting hard‑working businesswomen in their beauty salons. And, yes, the burkas hung on the hooks by the entrance. Those were still prevalent in those days too, but women had the freedom to go to salons and also earn a living serving their neighbours by running those salons. Now we know salons are closed by decree of the Taliban, immediately wiping out places for women to connect with each other and essential income and employment for many women.

I remember visiting a Hazara woman with her thriving bakery business. I remember visiting the widow Bibi Gul, who had literally carved by hand a modest home out of rock of the Kabul mountainside for her and her son to live in when they came back from living as refugees in Iran. Her $200 loan was used to import gold and silver threads from India to use in her embroidered badges for police and military. I wonder if Bibi and the women she trained are now shut down.

Honourable colleagues, excluding women from the Afghan economy hurts the women. It is devastating for their families. In a country with 70% of the population unable to even meet their most basic needs, it is a humanitarian disaster. It’s a travesty.

Colleagues, we know that Canada played an important role in standing with the majority Black population of South Africa against their cruel compatriot perpetrators of racial apartheid injustices in that country. Today, we have an opportunity once more to stand against injustices — to stand with the women and girls of Afghanistan against the cruel Taliban perpetrators of gender apartheid in that country.

Honourable colleagues, let’s support the women and girls of Afghanistan by recognizing the severity of their plight, and let’s urgently find innovative ways with our partners to support them to resist and put an end to these inhumane laws. Colleagues, on this theme, as we hear Speaker Gagné utter at the beginning of every Senate sitting — and I listened attentively today — “May we serve ever better the cause of peace and justice in our land and throughout the world.” Wela’lioq. Thank you.