GENEVA, Switzerland —
Afghan women made an impassioned plea at the UN Monday for solid
international action to address the “gender apartheid” in their country since
the Taliban swept to power last year.
اضافة اعلان
“Today, human
rights in Afghanistan do not exist,” Afghan Mahbouba Seraj told the UN Human
Rights Council in Geneva.
The outspoken
journalist and rights activist said she was “sick and tired” of sounding the
alarm over the decimation of the rights of women and girls, especially in
Afghanistan, and seeing no action.
The Taliban have
imposed harsh restrictions on girls and women to comply with their austere
vision of Islam since returning to power in August last year — effectively
squeezing them out of public life.
The hardline
Islamists have shut girls’ secondary schools in most provinces and barred women
from many government jobs.
They have also
ordered women to fully cover up in public, ideally with an all-encompassing
burqa.
“The women of
Afghanistan are now left to the mercy of a group that is inherently anti-women
and does not recognize women as human beings,” Razia Sayad, an Afghan lawyer
and former commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission,
told the council.
‘Staggering
regression’
Saraj agreed.
“Women of that
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 rights body to take any action possible to improve the situation.
“I’m begging all
of you: Please if this council has something to do, do it!” she said, adding
that “otherwise, please don’t talk about it. Because talking has been ...
cheap” when it comes to
Afghanistan.
“You’ve got to do
something.”
She and others
suggested the council could create an independent group of experts to monitor
all abuses, with an eye to eventually hold perpetrators to account.
“God only knows
what kind of atrocities are not being reported,” she warned.
Richard Bennett,
the special rapporteur on the rights situation in Afghanistan, also stressed
the urgent need to strengthen accountability, suggesting the situation could be
described as “gender apartheid”.
Earlier Monday,
Bennett had presented his first report on the overall rights situation, warning
the council that “Afghans are trapped in a human rights crisis that the world
has seemed powerless to address.”
In addition to
the “staggering regression” in the rights of women and girls, he listed a slew
of other violations, including the persecution of Hazara and other Shiite
minorities.
Afghanistan’s
Shiite Hazaras have faced persecution for decades, with the Taliban accused of
abuses against the group when they first ruled from 1996 to 2001 and picking up
again after they swept to power last year.
Bennet said
Hazara and other groups have been “arbitrary arrested, tortured, summarily
executed, displaced from traditional lands, subjected to discriminatory taxation
and otherwise marginalized.”
They are also the
frequent target of attacks, including by the Taliban’s enemy the Daesh-Khorasan
group, which considers 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 need to be fully investigated.”
International
crimes cover the most serious crimes of concern to the global community: war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
The UN mission in
Afghanistan has accused the Taliban authorities of intimidating and harassing
its female staff, including detaining three women for questioning on Monday.
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