EU imposes sanctions for violence against women

• Sanctions have been imposed on nine individuals and three official organizations.
• The names are likely to be formally added to the EU sanctions list later today.
• Member states had approved them.

BRUSSELS – The European Union sanctioned officials from six countries, including Russia and Afghanistan, on Tuesday ahead of International Women’s Day for violence and human rights violations against women.

Sanctions have been imposed on nine individuals and three official organizations, subjecting them to travel bans and the freezing of any assets held in the EU.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Fedorov and his deputy Ivan Ryabov are accused of ordering the arrest and torture of female anti-war protestors.

Russian special forces commander Major General Nikolai Kuznetsov and tank commander Colonel Ramil Ibatullin have also been named, as have units accused of systematic rape and sexual abuse in Ukraine.

The Taliban minister for higher education, Neda Mohammad Nadeem, and the minister for virtue propagation and vice repression, Muhammad Khalid Hanafi, are also named from Afghanistan.

The former is accused of depriving women of education, while the latter is accused of “restricting their freedom of expression and inflicting harsh punishments and brutality on those who do not obey the Taliban’s edicts.”

In South Sudan, Gatluak Nyang Hoth, the commissioner of Mayiandit county, and Gordon Koang Biel, the commissioner of Koch county, are accused of making “widespread and systematic use of sexual violence as a war tactic and instrumentalized it as a reward and entitlement for men participating in the conflict.”

Myanmar’s deputy minister of home affairs Toe Ui is said to have allowed military security agents to “use forced nudity, rape, electro-shocks, burning of genitalia and excessive violence during the arbitrary detention and interrogation of men, women.

Ui is a former head of the Office of the Chief of Military Security Affairs (OCMSA), which is listed separately as an agency responsible “for systematic and widespread sexual and gender-based violence.”

Iran’s Qarchak jail in Tehran province is identified as a place where guards sexually abuse women and threaten them with rape in order to elicit false confessions.

In Syria, the government is claimed to have ordered the Republican Guard to “employ sexual and gender-based violence to suppress and intimidate the Syrian people, particularly women, and girls.”

The names are likely to be formally added to the EU sanctions list later today, but diplomatic sources told that member states had approved them.

“By imposing these sanctions, we’re sending a clear message to perpetrators that they won’t get away with their crimes,” the Netherlands’ foreign minister Wopke Hoekstra said in a news release.

“This is also a message to the victims: the EU will support you, wherever you are in the world. Sanctions are a powerful way for us to stand up for universal values and force international change,” he said.

“We will not hesitate to expand the list to include other perpetrators of sexual violence.”

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