Hauling women off a plane as they tried to study overseas. Banning women from national parks. Pushing girls out of school at age 10. Shuttering all beauty salons at a cost of 60,000 women’s jobs.
These are the latest among what UN experts describe as the Taliban’s “widespread, systematic, and all-encompassing” attack on the rights of women and girls.
Human Rights Watch recently released a report stating that since the Taliban took over the country in August 2021, they have imposed laws and policies intended to deny women and girls their fundamental rights because of their gender.
This amounts to gender persecution, a crime against humanity.
Afghanistan also faces a catastrophic humanitarian crisis with 28 million people – two-thirds of the population – in urgent need of assistance. Women are banned from many types of paid work, including at international aid organizations. Today, it is impossible to determine whether women are receiving food aid or other assistance, as women have been forced out of the distribution and monitoring processes.
So where are the world’s diplomats?
My colleague and Associate Director for HRW’s Women’s Rights Division Heather Barr has some thoughts:
“For two years now, Taliban authorities have denied women and girls their rights, including to education, work, movement, and assembly. And when it comes to women’s rights in Afghanistan, it feels like the world’s diplomats have been on vacation every day of that time.
The response to the Taliban’s misogynistic abuses, when there was one, has been chaotic, uncoordinated, and lacking in urgency — mostly a sigh and a shrug with statements expressing deep concern.”
And it’s not hard to figure out what world leaders should be doing, according to Barr. Hint: it includes listening to women and not abandoning them to misogyny and abuse.
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