From Adjectives to Action for Afghan Women, Daily Brief August 28, 2024

Brutal. Outrageous. Sadistic. Dystopian.

We start to run out of adjectives when we talk about the Taliban’s all-out assault on women’s rights in Afghanistan. The Taliban thugocracy doesn’t just deny half the population its fundamental human rights; it rejects the very idea women are fundamentally human.

With every new announcement from the Taliban, it just gets worse.

Last week, the Taliban published new laws that require women to completely cover their bodies, including their faces, in public at all times. They have also declared women should not be heard speaking or singing in public.

This comes on top of other extreme restrictions on women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. They have banned girls and women from education beyond sixth grade, blocked them many forms of employment, and restricted their movement in public. A woman cannot leave her house without a male family member chaperoning her.

As my expert colleague, Sahar Fetrat, writes, the Taliban have “reduced women and girls to the status of non-humans.”

The Taliban try to twist Islamic law to justify their repressive measures like the ban on women’s voices, but look around: no other Muslim-majority country has such extreme restrictions on women. No other government tries to eliminate women’s very presence in public life in this obscene way. The Taliban are just making stuff up.

This may seem a strong claim, but I bet at most of Afghanistan’s people, almost all of them Muslims, would agree if you asked them. Oh, that’s right, you can’t, because the Taliban arrests and tortures people who criticize them.

It’s encouraging – inspirational, even – that Afghan women are continuing to bravely resist the Taliban’s attempt to erase them from public life. After the ban on women’s voices was announced, women inside Afghanistan posted videos of themselves singing.

But what can the outside world do to help?

“There are no easy answers,” my colleagues Sahar and Heather Barr explain in a recent article, “but there are answers.”

First, governments should insist Afghan women be full participants in all international meetings on Afghanistan. Holding high-level meetings with the Taliban – with not a woman in sight – as the UN did last month only boosts the Taliban’s status and their whole only-men-are-human ideology.

Second, the international focus should be on holding the Taliban to account for their crimes. Governments should support the International Criminal Court prosecution of Taliban leaders for committing the crime against humanity of gender persecution. They should also seriously consider including gender apartheid as a crime in the proposed crimes against humanity treaty.

Third, governments at the UN Human Rights Council should renew the mandate of the UN human rights expert on Afghanistan and create a new mechanism for collecting and preserving evidence of crimes committed in Afghanistan, including against women and girls.

The world has run out of adjectives to describe the Taliban’s brutality. Now, we need action.