Kelly White
30 January 2025: Cricket is a multi-billion-dollar sport, one of the most lucrative and popular in the world. Despite this, cricket’s international governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), has resisted calls to hold one of its member nations to account for violations of human rights.
Since taking power in August 2021, the Taliban has systematically erased the rights of women in Afghanistan. As of January 2025, Afghan women are not permitted in public without a male supervisor, are not permitted to show their faces or speak in public, and cannot attend university, have a job, or participate in sport.
The ICC sets out obligations for their members – one being that they should be fostering men's, women's and youth participation in the sport.
This should put the position of the Afghan Cricket Board (ACB) as a full member of the ICC in jeopardy, or at the very least, into question. Yet, the multi-million-dollar ICC funding to develop the women’s game still flows to the ACB, despite their women’s team living as refugees in Australia.
Just how much responsibility do global sporting bodies have for holding their members to account?
Dr Catherine Ordway, Associate Professor and Sport Integrity Research Lead at the University of Canberra, was one of the women responsible for bringing the Afghan women’s cricket team to Australia. She breaks down the complex intersections of human rights, sports and politics.
Do international sporting bodies have an ethical responsibility to intervene when member nations are committing human rights violations?
There has never been, and I hope there never will be, a worse example of gender apartheid in the world than what we are seeing in Afghanistan.
The United Nations’ long-held position is that sport is a human right. The international federations that administer sport must uphold and respect the United Nations position of inclusion and non-discrimination.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also has a human rights mandate in its Olympic Charter. It’s mandatory for all sports on the Olympic program to comply with it. Cricket is now on the Olympic program, so the International Cricket Council must report the IOC on its compliance with gender equality requirements.
Even if the ICC refuses to uphold its own rules – and the ICC introduced an Anti-Discrimination Policy in 2012 – it won’t be able to ignore the International Olympic Committee rules as part of the upcoming Los Angeles (LA) Olympic Summer Games in 2026.
The ICC claims that its Policy is “one of the toughest in world sport – confirms a level of commitment from the ICC and its Members to promote and encourage participation at all levels regardless of race, colour, religion, descent, culture, ethnic origin, nationality, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, marital status and/or maternity status and to ensure that there is no discrimination in the sport.” []
Have sanctions from international sporting bodies ever led to tangible outcomes?
We've certainly seen the International Federation for Football, FIFA, take action against its member federations for failure to comply with their regulations, including around gender equality.
In fact, FIFA has threatened to take action against Football Australia in the past, due to failures to comply with governance and gender parity policies. This was when Australia was bidding for the hugely successful Women's World Cup in 2023, and that action would have impacted both the men’s and women’s sides. .
From an International Olympic Committee perspective, a number of different National Olympic Committees have been suspended for a range of reasons, including government interference, which you could certainly argue in the case of Afghanistan.
The Afghan women’s cricket team want to play cricket and are calling for the ICC’s support, despite not playing under the Afghan Cricket Board. Is there precedent for this?
I think there's an argument for that, because the ban on women's participation in public life and sport is so extreme in Afghanistan.
There's an argument to be made that the ICC should be reserving at least half the money, if not more, to develop Afghan women cricketers around the world.
While 22 out of the 25 contracted players are here in Australia now, they're clearly not the only women that are keen on cricket from an Afghan heritage perspective. There are women in Pakistan, Iran, UK, Canada, Germany as a starting point, who want to have the opportunity to play – but in many cases, there is no coaching, training or development available for them.
The International Olympic Committee has shown leadership on supporting refugees to play at the highest levels since 2015. In individual sport, athletes have been able to participate at the Summer Olympic Games and the Youth Olympics as a refugee team. Competing with athletes from different countries, they are able to compete at the highest level in their sports, from swimming, to athletics and judo. [
The difference here, with the proposal from the Afghan women’s cricket team, is that this would be the first refugee team from a team sport. So that's another opportunity for the ICC to take a leadership role. It would send a strong message to the Taliban government, the women of Afghanistan and women of Afghan backgrounds around the world, that women can and want to play sport.
What options could the ICC employ in this instance?
There are lots of options available to the ICC. There are calls to ban the Afghan men's team from competing, because the ACB is not complying with its membership obligation to have a women's team. The ICC could also drop its full membership back down to an affiliate membership, which means the Afghan men's team couldn't play test matches. They could stop providing some or all of the approximately USD $50 million (AUD $80.1 million) a year funding they still provide to the ACB, part of which is supposed to be used for developing the women’s team.
I don't think a boycott led by national teams is appropriate. It shouldn't be on Cricket Australia or other national members to make a decision to boycott a match against the Afghan men's team. The leadership should come from the top.
Should sports and politics be separate?
I think that's total nonsense – politics is part of our life. Being apolitical is a political position right?
Being involved with sport, particularly if you're a woman from Afghanistan, is a political statement.
The Taliban certainly aren’t separating politics from sport. They’re using the Afghan men's team as a kind of sports washing opportunity to legitimise their regime.
In the first week that the Taliban took over in August 2021, instead of securing key services for their people, such as food and water, roads, communication channels, electricity, petrol and gas, one of their first actions was to take over the Chairman's role at the Afghan Cricket Board.
The Taliban views the ACB as a vehicle for demonstrating their power. They want to control their image through the nation’s most popular sport.
We've seen a whole range of female athletes escape out of Afghanistan: cycling, taekwondo, athletics, para-athletic and of course, the cricket team.
If these women have been brave enough to go against all the conservative social rules and norms in their own country – and this is before the Taliban [came to power there] – they are making a political statement about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a human, and to uphold their human right to play sport.
It is the least that the rest of us can do, to give them every opportunity to run out there onto the field!
Photos by Tyler Cherry and supplied