Afghan women pleaded passionately at the United Nations on Monday for robust international action to combat “gender apartheid” in their country since the Taliban took power last year.
“Today there are no human rights in Afghanistan,” Afghan Mahbouba Seraj told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The outspoken journalist and human rights activist said she was tired of sounding the alarm and not seeing action about the decimation of women’s and girls’ rights, particularly in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have imposed severe restrictions on girls and women since returning to power in August last year to conform to their austere vision of Islam – effectively edging them out of public life.
The hardline Islamists have closed secondary schools for girls in most provinces and barred women from many government positions.
They have also ordered women to cover themselves fully in public, ideally with an all-encompassing burqa.
“The women of Afghanistan are now at the mercy of a group that is inherently misogynistic and does not recognize women as human beings,” Razia Sayad, an Afghan lawyer and former commissioner of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, told the council.
– “Amazing Regression” –
“Women of this country, we don’t exist… We are erased,” she told the council during a debate focused specifically on the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.
She appealed to the top UN legal body to take all possible measures to improve the situation.
“I beg of you all: please, if this advice has anything to do, do it!” she said, adding that “otherwise please don’t talk about it. Because talking was … cheap” when it comes to Afghanistan.
“You have to do something.”
She and others suggested that the council could set up an independent group of experts to monitor all abuses and eventually hold perpetrators accountable.
“God only knows what atrocities go unreported,” she warned.
Richard Bennett, the special rapporteur on the legal situation in Afghanistan, also stressed the urgent need to strengthen accountability and suggested calling the situation “gender apartheid”.
Earlier on Monday, Bennett delivered his first general legal report, warning the council that “Afghan people are caught in a human rights crisis that the world seems powerless to combat.”
In addition to the “staggering decline” in the rights of women and girls, he listed a number of other violations, including the persecution of Hazara and other Shia minorities.
Afghanistan’s Shi’a Hazaras have faced persecution for decades, with the Taliban accused of abusing the group when they first ruled from 1996 to 2001, and cracking down again after coming to power last year.
Bennet said Hazara and other groups were “arbitrarily detained, tortured, summarily executed, expelled from traditional lands, subjected to discriminatory taxation, and otherwise marginalized.”
They are also frequent targets of attacks, including by the Taliban’s enemy, the Islamic State-Khorasan group, who consider them heretics.
“These attacks appear to be systematic in nature and reflect elements of an organizational policy,” Bennett told the council, warning that the attacks “bear the hallmarks of international crimes and must be fully investigated.”
International crimes include the most serious crimes affecting the world community: war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan has accused Taliban authorities of intimidating and harassing its female staff, including the arrest of three women for questioning on Monday.
