After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan on August 15th, 2021, it started to strip women of their fundamental rights. Before the Taliban took over, Afghanistan was already one of the most dangerous countries for women; gender inequality, discrimination, and gender-based violence were common. However, the previous government was relatively committed to upholding women’s rights. Therefore, women had opportunities in different sectors, including justice, civil society, politics, business, and media. Women were running the three branches of the government alongside men. They held 27 percent of the seats in parliament and 22 percent of the seats in the Senate, and 9.2 million children were attending schools, of which 38 percent of them were girls.
After the Taliban took over the government on August 15th, 2021, the Taliban regime implemented a policy of gender segregation in the country, at variance with what they had promised to the people and the international community. Under the Taliban’s rule, women lost all of their 20 years achievements and human rights due to the Taliban’s restrictions and anti-women policies.
– In September 2021, the Taliban converted the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (MPVPV), which implements the group’s strict interpretation of Islamic laws, particularly the group is determined to implement its women’s dress code policy.
– When the new educational year started last March, the Taliban banned girls from secondary education.
– Again, last March, the Taliban banned women from traveling abroad and going out of home without a mahram (family man). They also prohibit taxi drivers from boarding female passengers if they are not wearing the Taliban’s prescribed Hijab code. The Taliban now monitors the implementation of strict laws against women in large cities such as Kabul by setting up special checkpoints on the roads. With increasing travel restrictions and the absence of female doctors, women’s access to health services has declined, and maternal and child mortality rates have risen significantly.
– On May 7, the Taliban announced new rules for women to wear the compulsive hijab (Burqa). According to the Taliban May 7th decree, women have to cover their faces outside their houses. The Taliban said in the statement: that if a woman did not wear a burqa/chador or did not observe the hijab as intended by the Taliban, the head of the family would be questioned and punished, including imprisonment and be taken to court.
The Taliban decrees and bylaws have excluded women from public spaces, work, and educational centers. The Taliban has evicted almost all female government employees and officially barred them from working. Women who protested for their rights and freedoms were repressed; They were arrested and tortured. The examples mentioned above are just a few of the hundred’s examples of severe ill-treatment and discrimination against women by the Taliban in Afghanistan that the media have severely censored. The Taliban are determined to remove women from their social, political, and economic lives altogether and confine them to the walls of their homes.
The Association of Women Solidarity for Women believe that the world is responsible for Afghanistan’s Women and their deplorable condition. This association calls on the international community, European Union, United Nations, human rights organizations, and women’s rights advocacy groups to use every possible means to tame the Taliban in order to open the girls’ schools as soon as possible, to guarantee their right to work and their presence in the society, the compulsory hijab/burqa should be removed and save the women of Afghanistan. The world should force the Taliban to terminate all restrictions on women. The women in Afghanistan should have their rights upheld by the Human Rights Declaration.
Date: 1st July 2022
Roma, Italy
SOURCE: Associazione di solidarietà donne per le donne انجمن همبستگی زنان برای زنان
