Centering Survivors: The Imperative for Inclusive Justice in Crimes Against Humanity Treaty Negotiations

[Metra Mehran, is an activist from Afghanistan, member of the End Gender Apartheid Campaign and Afghanistan Advocacy Specialist at Amnesty International. 

Venesa Sulimani is a survivor-led advocate from Kosovo, advancing accountability for conflict-related sexual and other gender-based violence and mental health awareness.]

Last week, we sat in the United Nations in New York as preparations began on what could become the first global treaty on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. We listened as states spoke about procedure, structure, and legal architecture. For us, this is not an abstract exercise. It is a poignant moment that carries the weight of our lives, the atrocities our communities have suffered and continue to suffer, the future of the people we love, and the accountability and justice we seek.

The treaty is of historic importance. In a world of escalating risk, marked by mass atrocities, forced displacement, and systematic violence against civilians, such a treaty could decisively expand protections, strengthen the rules-based international order, and reaffirm the relevance of international law and multilateralism.

But the promise of the treaty depends on who is allowed to participate in and shape the process of its creation and substance. Currently, only ECOSOC-accredited organizations are able to participate in the preparatory process. Neither of us has such accreditation—as the process for registration is extremely cumbersome, politically fraught, and can take years to process. While we were privileged that ECOSOC-accredited organizations allowed us to serve as experts on their delegations, how many survivors or victims were in the room? By our count, at most three. 

We felt this absence personally. Many survivors we have met through our work were not there for a variety of reasons, including resources, sanctions, travel restrictions, and the limitations on non-ECOSOC-accredited civil society. 

Our perspectives matter because the world’s understanding of crimes against humanity is not confined to narrow legal frameworks or isolated examples over time. Rather, it has evolved through the lived experiences of victims, survivors, and affected communities. Our lives and experiences populate the understanding of these crimes that shock the conscience of humanity. However, we remain on the margins of such processes. 

One of us, Metra, is from Afghanistan, where crimes against humanity are not theoretical. Today, the Taliban are systematically entrenching systematic oppression and domination through the issuance and punitive enforcement of more than 235 discriminatory decrees, a regime that the women of Afghanistan have long called gender apartheid and have demanded be legally recognized as such. This institutionalized and systematic discrimination is now embedded in instruments such as the Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and the recently issued Criminal Procedure Code for courts. Together, these measures strip women, girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals of nearly every right to which they are entitled as human beings, including education, employment, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and the ability to practice culture and religion freely. They criminalize women’s voices, faces, and very existence and divide society into the “free” and “enslaved.” 

The other of us, Venesa, is a survivor of the Kosovo war. During the armed conflict, an estimated 20,000 women and men were subjected to sexual violence by Serbian military forces; my mother was one of those victims. At the time, I was only a child and witnessed this crime that shaped my life and identity. Today, I speak and advocate about the harms of crimes against humanity and how they do not end when the violence stops. They seep into our daily lives, with intergenerational impacts. Survivors and their children live with lasting mental, physical, psychological, and economic consequences. The pursuit of justice is not limited to just those who suffered direct physical violence.

Survivors need more than recognition. We need the ability to speak openly about what we endured. We need compensation, resources, and sustained support so we are not forced to live in constant fear and anxiety. Most importantly, we need to be centered in the design and implementation of justice and accountability for ourselves and our communities. Often, people speak of us when they talk about justice, but we are agents, not objects. We can speak for ourselves, and that’s why our presence and meaningful participation are essential to the legitimacy of such processes.

We, civil society participants—including survivor groups, activists, lawyers, academics, and practitioners—ground legal processes, such as the ongoing negotiations, in reality. Activists, victims, and survivors understand better than anyone how crimes are committed, concealed, and experienced. Academics bring decades of legal expertise. Practitioners can help to ensure provisions are workable and enforceable.  

Participation is also how trust and legitimacy are built. Excluding us risks producing a treaty that looks powerful on paper but fails when it matters most. 

Take, for example, the imperative to ensure a gender-competent approach to the treaty. Last week, we heard that gender is a polarizing concept, one that does not have a universal understanding. However, for the two of us, who have suffered vastly different gender-based harms in different parts of the world, gender is a unifying lens. We have experienced how gender informs the design and perpetration of atrocities, and our experiences are a testament to the fact that gender perspectives are neither “western” nor ancillary concerns. 

This week, the Preparatory Committee for the treaty will conclude its first session. By Friday, they must decide on the modalities for participation of civil society without ECOSOC accreditation, including many survivors and affected communities. Recent UN processes have recognized that inclusive civil society participation, marked by transparency, diversity, accessibility, and meaningful stakeholder engagement, is essential to legitimacy. The crimes against humanity treaty must meet that standard. As nearly 400 individuals and organizations from across continents have urged, it should affirm openness by allowing civil society without ECOSOC accreditation to participate meaningfully, taking into full account physical, communication, and other accessibility barriers, as well as state reprisals. 

Today, we see the continually shrinking space for civil society, including by directly muzzling the voices of those affected by atrocities. From Palestine, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, and Ukraine, activists have been under attack, forced into exile. Women human rights defenders are silenced, criminalized, or erased from public life. Expecting these groups to obtain or maintain formal registration, let alone ECOSOC accreditation, under such conditions ignores the realities of repression and displacement.

The treaty can be a statement against the global regression of human rights and the growing gender backlash. For that to happen, the global community must have trust in the process and be given agency within it. In this way, the full and meaningful inclusion of diverse civil society, including victims, survivors, and affected communities, is not merely a procedural matter but a principled one. This Friday, when the Preparatory Committee takes its decision, we implore them to ensure inclusive and meaningful civil society participation. Those of us who have experienced (or continue to experience) these horrific crimes are watching and looking forward to being able to take our rightful place in the process.