Roqia Samim ’22LL.M. arrived at Notre Dame to attend law school in August 2021, a week before the government of her home country of Afghanistan collapsed and the Taliban again seized power. The power vacuum occurred in the chaotic aftermath of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, where they had been stationed since 2001.
Samim hasn’t been back to Afghanistan since then and isn’t sure when she’ll be able to return home. But she knows her life’s mission.
“I want to fight for equality. I want to fight for women’s rights. I decided to work for women’s rights because I was a woman in Afghanistan. I witnessed women in Afghanistan facing discrimination,” says Samim, an international human rights attorney and program director at the University’s Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights.
“I focus on women because they are the most deprived group and the most marginalized group in Afghanistan,” she says.
The Taliban is a Sunni Islamist nationalist movement that emerged in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. The group rules with a strict interpretation of Islamic law and draws international condemnation for its human rights abuses, particularly against women and girls.
Since the Taliban reclaimed power in 2021, the group’s edicts forbid Afghan girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and ban women from most work outside the home. Women must veil their bodies and their voices are not permitted to be heard in public. They are barred from most public spaces.
For Samim, 30, watching from afar, the edicts are a chilling return to the norms in Afghanistan when she was a girl growing up in Herat, a city of more than a half million residents in the nation’s west.
As the youngest in a family of six children, Samim watched as her two older sisters left each day to attend a secret school — all schooling in those days was forbidden for girls. The school was held in the house of a woman who had been a teacher before the Taliban came to power.
All that changed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaida, the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks. The Taliban had provided al-Qaida safe haven for its training operations, and the war quickly pushed the Taliban out of power.
By then, Samim was of school age, and she was able to attend school in the open, because learning was no longer forbidden for girls. Her sisters were able to finish secondary school and go to college. One became a computer engineer and the other a civil engineer.
Burqas, the billowing head-to-toe garments women were required to wear in public under Taliban rule, became optional.
“Life opened up with opportunities — not only for my family, but for all people in Afghanistan, especially for women and girls,” says Samim, who is a practicing Muslim. “Millions of girls went back to school. The university doors were open for female students. Women returned to the workforce in different sectors.”
Samim’s father was a physician, and she would sometimes accompany him to his clinic, dreaming of becoming a doctor herself.
She attended coeducational classes at Herat University, earning a law degree in 2014. Her focus changed from medicine to law because she wanted to work toward further reform in her homeland and an end to discrimination against women.
“I was thinking, what could I do to be more effective in changing society? I was a resilient, resistant girl,” she says. “I wanted to become a lawyer. And more than becoming a lawyer, I wanted to become an advocate for women’s rights.”
“I don’t want to just accept everything that I have been told,” she says. She ignored men who tried to tell Afghan women and girls how they were permitted to dress in public. “This was resistance at a very basic level,” she recalls.
An article Samim wrote analyzing Afghan women’s rights under Taliban rule and international legal mechanisms to safeguard women’s rights was published in January in the Yale Journal of International Law. In the article, Samim argues that women’s rights are fundamental to achieving social justice, economic prosperity and sustainable development.
The resurgence of the Taliban has severely undermined women’s rights in Afghanistan, creating what Samim refers to as a system of “gender apartheid.” It undermines existing international legal frameworks and serves as a stark reminder of the fragile state of gender equality globally, she says.
To address these challenges, instruments such as treaties, declarations and other texts that form the basis of international human rights law should shift from advisory recommendations to binding obligations with clear legal consequences for noncompliance, Samim says. That would reaffirm the universality of women’s rights and provide stronger protections against systemic violations.
Sanctions would further pressure the regime to ensure women’s rights and access to education and jobs, but there doesn’t appear to be much international support for such measures, she says. “Recognizing gender apartheid as a crime against humanity would make [the Taliban] more accountable,” she adds.
After college, Samim worked in several jobs, including as a human rights advocate for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, a provincial coordinator for the Women’s Leadership Development program within the U.S. Agency for International Development, and as a human rights assistant and associate political affairs officer in the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
Once Samim earned her Notre Dame master’s degree in international human rights law, she intended to return to Afghanistan and her U.N. work there. But she was not able to return because of her history of advocacy. With the Taliban in power, she would be in danger.
Being a woman who traveled alone — without a male relative as guardian — to study in a foreign country is forbidden, “a crime for women under the Taliban rules,” she explains. “I work for human rights. The Taliban do not believe in human rights. I work for gender equality. That’s something that they’re against,” she says.
Her entire family fled. Her parents and two of her siblings now live in Germany. She and three other siblings live in the United States.
Samim continues her fight to bring equality and civil rights to the women of Afghanistan. She remains in contact with women there, getting updates on conditions via email and cell phone calls. “Even though the Taliban tried to erase women from public life and tried to silence their voices, women are resistant,” she says.
All the nation’s colleges and universities, including Herat University, now educate only men. Women can no longer even attend school to work as nurses or midwives.
“The Taliban don’t consider women human beings. That’s the biggest issue,” Samim says.
Yet the story of Afghanistan — especially the story of its women — is far more complex, rich and resilient than news headlines typically convey, Samim says. There is deep pain and injustice, but there is also strength, beauty and resistance that often goes unseen.
Through it all, she longs to return to Afghanistan. “At the moment, I can’t go back. I would happily go back home,” she says. “Going back to my homeland, that would be the greatest feeling that I could have.”
She isn’t giving up. “I feel like the thing that I can do is to be the voice of those women. To raise the urgency and help their voices to be heard,” Samim says. “My own journey — from growing up in Herat to advocating for women’s rights to continuing to work at Notre Dame — has taught me that even in the darkest moments, there is always a light worth protecting.”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.