Repression “suffocating” of the Taliban in Afghanistan deprives “millions of women and girls of their right to live free and fulfilling lives in safety”denounces Wednesday, July 27 in an Amnesty International report, almost a year after the Taliban took power.
Since taking over the country on August 15, 2021, the Taliban have “violated the rights of women and girls to education, work and freedom of movement”, says the NGO. The protection and support system for people fleeing domestic violence has been decimated. Women and girls have been arrested for minor breaches of discriminatory rules. And child marriages, early marriages and forced marriages have risen sharply in Afghanistan in almost a year.
Amnesty points out that every detail of the daily life of women and girls is controlled and subject to severe restrictions: if they can go to school, if and how they work, if and how they leave their homes. In nearly a year, the Taliban have introduced policies of systematic discrimination that undermine their rights, says Amnesty International. The women and girls who demonstrated against this repression were thus subjected to arbitrary arrests and detentions, enforced disappearances, and acts of physical and psychological torture.
As far as education is concerned, the Taliban continue to prevent the vast majority of female secondary school students from going to school. At the university, the harassment of female students by the Taliban has created an insecure environment where female students are systematically disadvantaged.
In its report, Amnesty International calls on the Taliban to adopt far-reaching political changes, as well as measures aimed at upholding the rights of women and girls.
The NGO also calls on the international community to impose measures against the behavior of the Taliban. She argues for a robust strategy to incentivize these changes. In particular, it calls for targeted sanctions or travel bans, through a United Nations Security Council resolution. It is about holding the Taliban to account for the treatment of women and girls, without harming the Afghan population.
For this report, Amnesty International researchers investigated Afghanistan from September 2021 to June 2022, based in particular on interviews with 90 Afghan women and 11 young girls, aged 14 to 74, living in 20 of the 34 Afghan provinces.