- UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet condemned the massive unemployment of women, the restrictions placed on the way they dress, and their access on basic services.
- Women-owned and operated businesses have been shut down, Ms. Bachelet added, saying that 1.2 million girls no longer have access to secondary education, in line with a decision by the de facto authorities who took power in August 2021.
Delegates attending an urgent debate at the U.N. Human Rights Council on the status of women and girls in Afghanistan are urging the international community to exert maximum pressure on the Taliban.
In opening Friday’s debate, U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet accused the Taliban of systematic oppression and of the exclusion of women and girls from public life in Afghanistan.
She told the rights council that domestic violence and harassment have grown under Taliban rule, as have attacks against female human rights defenders, journalists, and lawyers. She said that women can no longer find employment and that secondary schooling for more than a million girls has ended.
She said an increasing number of restrictions on movement and dress have plunged women into a deep depression.
“While some of these concerns predate the Taliban takeover in August 2021, reforms at that time were moving in the right direction. There were improvements and hope," Bachelet said. "However, since the Taliban took power, women and girls are experiencing the most significant and rapid rollback in enjoyment of their rights across the board in decades.”
“The de facto authorities I met with during my visit in March this year, said they would honour their human rights obligations as far as [being] in line with Sharia law.
“Yet despite these assurances, we are witnessing the progressive exclusion of women and girls from the public sphere and their institutionalised, systematic oppression”.
Bachelet encouraged the re-establishment of an independent mechanism to receive complaints from the public and protect victims of gender-based violence.
“Beyond being right, it is also a matter of practical necessity”, said the High Commissioner. “Amid the economic crisis, women’s contribution to economic activity is indispensable, which itself requires access to education, and freedom of movement and from violence”.
Also speaking at the Human Rights Council, its Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, described a chilling attempt by the Taliban to make women “invisible, by excluding them almost entirely from society”.]
As an example of the de facto authorities’ intentions to impose “absolute gender discrimination”, the independent rights expert also noted that women are now represented by men at Kabul’s Loya Jirga, or grand assembly of religious scholars and elders.
Such measures contravene Afghanistan’s obligations under numerous human rights treaties to which it is a State party, Mr. Bennett insisted before adding that the situation for women “massively diminish(ed) women’s lives, deliberately attack women and girls’ autonomy, freedom and dignity, and create a culture of impunity for domestic violence, child marriage and sale and trafficking of girls, to name but a few of the consequences”.