On Oct. 14, Karima Bennoune will deliver a lecture on "Ending Gender Apartheid: Lessons from Afghanistan" as speaker for the 2024 J. Jobe and Marguerite Jacqmin Soffa Lecture. A renowned scholar of international law and human rights, Bennoune will explore the ongoing struggle for gender equality in Afghanistan, where oppressive regimes have institutionalized gender-based discrimination. Drawing on her extensive research and advocacy, she will analyze the impact of these policies and highlight the resilience of Afghan women.  

Bennoune is the Lewis M. Simes Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. She specializes in public international law and international human rights law, including issues related to culture, extremism and terrorism, and women’s human rights.

Bennoune served as the UN special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights from 2015 to 2021. She was also appointed as an expert for the International Criminal Court in 2017 during the reparations phase of the groundbreaking case The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, which concerned intentional destruction of cultural heritage sites in Mali.  

In September 2023, she addressed the UN Security Council about gender apartheid in Afghanistan. In December 2023, she traveled to South Africa with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai to participate with her and Nelson Mandela’s widow, the prominent human rights advocate Graça Machel, in a panel following Malala’s Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.  

The Women in International Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law presented her with its 2024 Prominent Woman in International Law Award.  

Since 2018, she has been a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law.  

A former legal adviser for Amnesty International, she has carried out human rights missions in most regions of the world.  

  

Interview with Professor Bennoune

We sat down with Professor Bennoune to discuss her introduction to international law, memorable moments from her illustrious career, urgent issues in international law today and more. 
  

Question: What initially drew you to specialize in public international law and international human rights law? How has your identity as an Arab-American shaped your approach to law and human rights advocacy? 

Answer: It was the experience of the Algerian side of my family in the country’s war of independence that led me to my career path. My grandfather and two uncles died fighting the French Army, my grandmother was wounded by the army and the family home was destroyed, and my father and another uncle were imprisoned and tortured by colonial forces for their participation in Algeria’s independence movement. I was raised knowing about this history, and I wanted to work toward a world where no one’s family has to face such horror. So, I guess it was about finding a kind of positive revenge as it were.  

A career in international law also reflects my life as a third culture kid, living on multiple continents and with parents from two different countries. I feel at home in international spaces. 

A significant component of my work has focused on Muslim majority regions of the world. I believe in an international law that looks at the world from all directions and takes seriously diverse Global South perspectives.  
  

Q: Can you share some of the most memorable moments from your time as the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights? 

A: Some of the most powerful moments involved working with frontline human rights defenders, trying to support them when their rights were at risk, to amplify their voices in the UN system, and to learn from their expertise. All too often there is not enough consultation of those most affected by human rights violations.   

Just to share one example, I had the honor of working with an Iraqi priest, Father Najeeb Michael, who had smuggled precious historic manuscripts out of Iraq, fleeing the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). He told me that he stopped to pick up some displaced people who were running for their lives, even though he knew it would slow him down, but he knew he had to do this, recognizing the fundamental importance of protecting human beings.

When he got to the border with Iraqi Kurdistan, he was told he could not cross with a vehicle for security reasons. At that point, he asked everyone he had picked up to help him hand carry the manuscripts across the border – and they did, returning each precious historical record on the other side. He did the principled thing, and it turned out also to be the most effective thing to do to protect cultural heritage. I have never forgotten that lesson. I invited him to speak during the UN General Assembly back in 2016 when I presented my report on cultural heritage protection. 
  

Q: In September 2023, you addressed the UN Security Council about gender apartheid in Afghanistan. What message were you hoping to convey to the international community? 

A: Here is some of what I told the Council: Since August 2021, the Taliban have stripped Afghan women of most of their human rights, including to education, to work, to freedom of movement, to take part in public life and to access remedies. The Taliban are not simply failing to uphold women’s rights—oppression of women is central to their system of governance and a core part of their philosophy. 

Day after day, women from across Afghanistan, from different ethnic groups, tell me about the devastating impact of Taliban rule. One Uzbek woman from Takhar who previously worked in civil society said she tried to commit suicide. "I am afraid," she explained, "that they will ban women from breathing without a man’s permission." A woman protestor in Kabul said, "The Taliban have imprisoned us in our homes. What we are experiencing every day is gradual death. This is what it feels like to live under gender apartheid." 

I called for the international community to listen to the voices of Afghan women and codify the crime of gender apartheid. I also asked the Security Council to make clear through action that the international community will not tolerate the system of gender apartheid the Taliban have imposed.  
  

Q: Your book, “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here,” tackles extremism and terrorism from the perspective of those within Muslim communities. How did you approach these difficult topics, and what has the response been from the communities you wrote about? 

A: A key part of the approach was to frame extremism not simply as a security issue, but a human rights question. In the contemporary period, Western discourse has sometimes seemed to offer only two choices: the openly discriminatory or flawed characterization (Islam is inherently fundamentalist, all Muslims are fundamentalists and so on) that one sometimes hears on the right, or the one that is too politically correct to even broach the topic of fundamentalism as one sometimes notes on the left. Neither one is helpful or accurate and both do a grave disservice to the people living on the frontlines who are suffering at the hands of extremists. What I sought to do is to offer an entirely different way of talking about this, which is based on the lived experience of those most affected, to give them the microphone.  

For this project, I interviewed nearly 300 people of Muslim heritage from nearly 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali, to learn about their opposition to extremism. The people I met were incredibly diverse. I interviewed sheikhs and bloggers, housewives and sexual rights activists. I interviewed people who excused themselves to pray in the middle of interviews, and others who drank wine to toast the birthday of the Prophet Mohamed (or Mouloud as it is called in North Africa, a holiday that fundamentalists frown on).

The people I met included an Imam’s daughter in Niger named Aminatou Daouda, who promotes CEDAW (the UN Women’s rights convention) and believes that treaty to be entirely reconcilable with her Muslim faith. And Diep Saeeda of the Pakistan Institute for Peace and Secularism Studies who organized demonstrations against Taliban abuses and terrorist atrocities in Lahore despite being threatened regularly and told that suicide bombers will also come to her events, and a man I call Mr. Bodmar who risked his life to keep his school open and educating boys and girls side-by-side in northern Mali under the occupation of jihadist groups 10 years ago. I asked myself again and again, why are such people not more recognized internationally? Everyone knows who Bin Laden was. Why is it that so few know of those who have been standing up to the Bin Ladens in their contexts? 

That is part of why I carried out this research. To try to win them more recognition and support. I also did it for very personal reasons because my own father, Mahfoud Bennoune, an anthropologist of Muslim heritage, risked his life throughout the 1990s to stand up to extremism in his home country of Algeria. Even when he was driven from his home and forced to stop teaching at the university due to death threats from the fundamentalist armed groups battling the Algerian state, he remained in the country and continued to publish pointed criticisms of both the fundamentalists and the government they fought. In a three-part series published in the newspaper El Watan in November 1994 called “How Fundamentalism produced a terrorism without precedent,” he denounced what he called the terrorists’ "radical break with true Islam as it was lived by our ancestors."   

Algerian democrats like Mahfoud Bennoune and many others received little support internationally in the 1990s, because of the failure to recognize the depth of the threat to human rights from extremist ideologies and movements. Doing this work on the frontlines without international support or comprehension is a lonely endeavor. As Malian lawyer Saran Keita Diakite told me in Bamako in December 2012, at a time when the entire north of her country was occupied by jihadist armed groups: "International solidarity is very helpful. When you live such a crisis alone, it is much more difficult to bear."    
  

Q: What do you think are the most urgent issues in international law today? 

A: We need a truly 21st Century international law to respond to contemporary problems. This law needs to respond to the existential threats humanity faces today such as the climate emergency – one of the biggest threats we have ever faced as Hurricane Milton reminds us.  21st Century international law needs to be fully inclusive of women’s rights since women represent half of the human population and have been historically underrepresented in the field of international law. It needs to consolidate the achievements of 20th Century international law, such as the prohibition on the use of force in Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter which is now gravely under threat given that we are witnessing more international armed conflict than any time since the advent of the charter.

Politics have prevented the international system from adequately responding to this problem. We need an international law that is applied consistently, not just to opponents but also to allies and to the conduct of our own country. We need to take the UN Charter seriously. It aims “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” and it reaffirms fundamental human rights and specifically the equal rights of men and women.

The terrible wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine and all the international crimes they have occasioned, the atrocities committed during the October 7 attacks, the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime which strips Afghan women of all of their human rights – all these are terrible threats to the promise of the Charter. We must build and sustain an international legal system that can respond more effectively. That depends on political will, which has to be built from the ground up. 
  

Q: You’ve taught at prestigious institutions. How have your experiences as an educator influenced your human rights work? Where do you see the future of international human rights law heading? 

A: I always say that you should not really theorize in the field of human rights unless you have practiced in the field. My theory is grounded in practice. My practice is informed by the opportunity for reflection afforded by academia. And I have tried to involve my students in as much frontline human rights work as possible, taking them with me to the UN when I was a Special Rapporteur, and supporting their work on and through the UN system now in my UN Human Rights Practicum. My goal is to achieve synergy between scholarship, advocacy and teaching. 

The next generation of human rights lawyers are the future of that law. It is so important to me to do what I can to help train them, and to learn from them. 
  

Q: In what ways do you think legal education needs to evolve to better prepare future human rights lawyers for the challenges they will face?  

A: Legal education needs to always bear in mind that we are living in a globalized world. It is important for all lawyers to understand international law. This is true both because it may be relevant to almost any area of practice today, and because it is essential for training students who are not just citizens of countries, but also citizens of the world. As the UN Secretary General has noted: "Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish." International law can and should be the law of a humanity that chooses cooperation. 
  

Q: What advice would you give to young lawyers and activists who want to make an impact in the field of human rights? 

A: Listen to the voices of those most affected by the problems you set out to help solve. 
  

Q: How do you balance the emotional toll of working on such critical and often distressing human rights issues? 

A: My generation of human rights lawyers was not trained to think about self-care. It is something I am learning more about from younger generations. I have come to understand that self-care is an essential part of healthy, sustainable human rights work. I find that for me, having a rich cultural life is an essential way to keep me going in this work, as is bathing in nature through things like kayaking and hiking.

Ultimately, what inspires me the most is the determination of frontline human rights defenders, like the group of Afghan women I just met up with in New York City at an American Society of International Law event. No matter how tough things get in their home country, they simply do not, will not, give up. As an Afghan woman said to me back in Kabul in 2011, "Optimism is key to survival." 

  

About the Soffa Lecture

"Women and children are oppressed all over the world. If we can shine a light on issues that matter to them, we can take steps to make their lives better."

Marguerite Jacqmin Soffa '46 BA L&S established an annual public lecture series in 2001 to be given by a distinguished woman in international public life about contemporary issues of global significance. Presenters have included renowned and well-known "grassroots" leaders in the struggle for human rights and international understanding. The lecture was coordinated by the Office of International Studies and Programs until the Human Rights Program was created in 2013.