To mark three years of rule in Afghanistan, the Taliban recently issued new laws aimed at further erasing and silencing women. Under outdated pretexts such as “preventing vice” and “promoting virtue,” millions of Afghan women are being confined, masked, muzzled, and condemned to lives of domesticity and breeding, under the all-too-indolent eye of the international community.
They were already significantly cut off from ordinary life, the kind that, elsewhere in the world, is marked by basic rights that are taken for granted. New moral laws imposed by the Taliban regime now forbid women from singing in public, reciting poetry or even reading aloud. They could no longer go to school, the park, or the hair or beauty salon: they are now ordered to cover themselves from head to toe, including their eyes, with a cloth that is neither light, short nor tight. They will no longer be able to glance at a man who is not a member of the family, nor travel on a bus without being accompanied by him.
These infamous laws, which can lead to arrest or detention for those who dare to violate them, represent a huge step backwards in terms of women’s rights. While the world celebrates all the victories associated with reducing the hypersexualization of women, the Taliban are taking the opposite path, a path where even women’s voices are sexualized and considered “private” to be heard only by their husbands or family. Isn’t this totally abject?
With courage and anger guiding their actions, they began to film themselves, at home, outside, singing, smiling, wearing makeup, sometimes veiled. Like others before them who had broadcast viral videos of their long hair flowing in the wind, defying Islamist laws, they make the timbre of their voices heard, to defy the absurdity and violence of the regime that is trying to erase them. It is at the risk of their safety and their lives that they do so.
Since the 1990s, when the Taliban regime was first wreaking havoc, the concept of gender apartheid has been circulating in Afghan women’s rights circles and among their feminist allies. It fits perfectly with this description of a world where a woman, for the sole crime of being born a woman, cannot work or go to school, risks severe punishment if she sets foot outside her home without the accompaniment of a male close to her, and must wear a burqa, a full-face veil born in Afghanistan that covers the entire body, including the eyes, with a form of mesh. From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban inflicted their first oppressive commandments on girls and women. Since their return in 2021, the escalation has been horrifying. In the name of an Islamist law that they have revised and strengthened, the Taliban are shaping a world where women are accessories and subjugated.
In his report published last June, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, linked the violations of the human rights of women and girls by the oppressive Taliban regime to crimes against humanity, including gender-based persecution. Since last June, at least 52 decrees have been issued to further restrict women’s freedom. The oppressors are ruthless.
What opposition do they face? While the Taliban regime outrages and shocks the international community, it has failed to impose its wrath. In late June, the UN failed miserably at its third meeting of special envoys for Afghanistan (Doha III), refusing to invite non-Taliban Afghan stakeholders, such as women, religious and ethnic minorities, and human rights groups, to the table, leaving the Taliban leaders’ odious smiles as the only Afghan representation for official cameras and photos. Canada has publicly expressed its disappointment at this resounding failure. “None of the goals that Afghans seek to achieve are possible without the full participation of women,” declared Canadian Special Representative David Sproule.
In the circle of rights defenders specializing in the situation of Afghan women, it is believed that the royal road – but difficult – remains to denounce this crisis loudly and clearly, and to try to hold accountable and punish through international criminal courts. Governments around the world should work together to ensure that the Taliban’s actions against women’s rights are brought before the International Criminal Court, or even the International Court of Justice. While Afghan women are silenced, the world must join in its actions.