(United Nations) Members of the UN Security Council were still divided on Monday on whether to exempt some Taliban officials from the travel ban, diplomatic sources said.
Posted yesterday at 5:16 p.m.
Under a 2011 Security Council resolution, 135 Taliban leaders are subject to a sanctions regime that includes asset freezes and travel bans.
Thirteen of them benefited from an exemption from the travel ban, renewed regularly, to allow them to meet officials from other countries abroad.
But this exemption ended on Friday evening, after Ireland objected to its automatic renewal for another month.
In June, the Sanctions Committee in charge of Afghanistan, composed of the 15 members of the UN Security Council, had already removed from the list two Taliban ministers responsible for education, in retaliation for the drastic reduction in the rights of women and girls by the regime.
Several Western countries would like to further reduce this list, according to diplomatic sources. They highlight the failure to respect the commitments made by the Taliban when they returned to power a year ago, in terms of human rights or the fight against terrorism, while the United States recently announced the death by strike drone in Kabul of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
China and Russia, on the other hand, supported an identical extension.
“These exemptions are still just as necessary,” the Chinese presidency of the Security Council justified last week, considering “counterproductive” to link human rights to travel issues for Taliban officials.
Since last week and again on Monday, several compromise proposals, more or less reducing the list of officials concerned or even the authorized destinations, have been rejected on both sides, according to diplomatic sources. Discussions should therefore continue.
Pending a possible decision, none of the Taliban officials on the sanctions list can no longer travel. This concerns in particular the head of diplomacy of the Taliban Amir Khan Muttaqi, who has visited Qatar several times in recent months for diplomatic discussions and who was among the 13 exempted.
In a tweet posted on Saturday, the spokesman for the Taliban’s foreign ministry called on the Security Council “not to use sanctions as leverage”, calling for all sanctions against Taliban officials to be lifted.