"This is Gender Apartheid" Women Leading Peace founder challenges global complicity at the UN CSW 2025

March 12, 2025, United Nations Commission on the Status of Women

Zakira, who is the founder and Executive Director of Women Leading Peace, was invited to address the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Her remarks challenged the international community's self-congratulatory narrative of progress, centering the voices of Afghan women and girls who have lived under Taliban rule since 2021. She calls out the structural failures that have left Afghan women and girls behind not by accident, but by design, and closes with a direct message to young women on the frontlines of the fight for gender equality.