Boundaries of Expression podcast: Gender apartheid

In the third episode of our series on Iran, Jo Glanville meets Professor Karima Bennoune, Lewis M. Simes Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and former UN rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. Professor Bennoune is leading a campaign on gender apartheid - the institutionalised oppression of women based on gender - to be recognised as an international crime.

As work is underway on the Crimes Against Humanity Treaty, Professor Bennoune, alongside campaigners in Afghanistan and Iran, is calling for gender apartheid to be included in the new treaty, to protect the rights of women and girls.

This podcast was recorded in February 2025.

Jo Glanville is a journalist and audio producer. She regularly produces and presents documentaries for the BBC. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, Financial Times and London Review of Books, among other publications. She was an award-winning editor of Index on Censorship and a former director of English PEN. She is editor of Looking for an Enemy: eight essays on antisemitism (Short Books/WW Norton) and Qissat: short stories by Palestinian women (Telegram/Saqi).

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Listen to episodes 1 and 2 of our podcasts on Iran:

The search for justice

Digital repression and queer resistance in Iran and the wider region