The announcement got here because the United Nations Safety Council — which has not acknowledged the Taliban-run authorities — met in New York to debate developments in Afghanistan, the place the U.N. estimates some 97 p.c of individuals dwell in poverty amid dire financial and humanitarian crises compounded by Taliban management.
Talking to the council because the information broke, Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Robert Wooden condemned “within the strongest phrases this positively indefensible place.”
“The Taliban can not count on to be a authentic member of the worldwide neighborhood till they respect the rights of all Afghans, particularly the human rights and elementary freedoms of girls and ladies,” he added.
British U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward mentioned the ban was “one other egregious curtailment of girls’s rights and a deep and profound disappointment for each single feminine scholar,” Reuters reported.
Ziaullah Hashmi, who shared the information in a letter on his private Twitter account, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The Taliban harshly curtailed girls’s freedoms after they dominated most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The group banned girls and ladies from learning, barred them from working or leaving their properties with out a male family member and mandated that they be in a head-to-toe overlaying in public. In some instances, the militants publicly executed girls who violated their guidelines primarily based on an excessive interpretation of Islamic legislation.
After a U.S.-led struggle toppled the federal government, Afghan girls steadily gained better entry to schooling, employment and political alternatives.
However the good points abruptly got here crashing down in August 2021, when Washington withdrew its final troops and the Taliban swiftly retook management. Regardless of pledging to have reformed, the group reinstated bans on ladies in main and secondary colleges and reimposed its repressive costume code, amongst different restrictions on girls’s employment, motion and on a regular basis lives.
The USA, European Union and United Nations, amongst others, have imposed sweeping sanctions and funding freezes on Afghanistan and pledged to not acknowledge the Taliban-led authorities except it basically reforms.
“We’ll proceed to work with this Council to talk with one voice on this concern,” Wooden mentioned Tuesday.
“The Taliban are making it clear each day that they don’t respect the elemental rights of Afghans, particularly girls,” tweeted Fereshta Abbasi, a researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, on Tuesday.
