The Observer view on Afghanistan: Britain and the US are complicit in the Taliban’s oppression of women

‘So pervasive is the Taliban’s institutionalised gender oppression, and so slender are the spaces in which women and girls may live freely, that in Afghanistan today almost any act can be characterised as an act of resistance.”
That conclusion from Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, encapsulates how unbearably suffocating it is to be female in Afghanistan today: excluded from education and from running a business; forbidden from going outside for a walk or to exercise, to speak or show any part of their face or body outside the home; or even for their voices to be heard singing or reading from within their own home. There is no other country where women and girls are so oppressed on the basis of their sex.
The US and the UK are complicit in this oppression. Their abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 triggered the collapse of the Afghan government under which the situation for women and girls was improving. This paved the way for the predictable takeover of the country by the Taliban. Since then, it has withdrawn even the most basic human rights of women and girls.
Last month, it published a set of more extreme “vice and virtue” laws prohibiting women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes, or being heard from within their home by those outside it. The rules of the Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice – sometimes issued only verbally – lack clarity and consistency, while failure to adhere to them can lead to severe punishments including beatings, public lashing, enforced disappearances and killings. In July, the Guardian reported that it had seen video evidence of a female Afghan human rights activist being gang-raped and tortured in a Taliban prison. Afghanistan ranks bottom in the Women Peace and Security Index of 177 countries in relation to women’s rights, justice and security.
Despite this intolerable situation – in which exercising the most basic of liberties can get women and girls killed – there is an active resistance movement, involving huge acts of bravery. Women are confronting the Taliban on the street, advocating to represent themselves at the UN, setting up education organisations, and posting acts of resistance online.
Yet they have been let down again by the failure of liberal democracies to take action against the Taliban. In June, the UN held a conference on Afghanistan and acceded to the Taliban’s demands that Afghan women be excluded. Afghanistan under the Taliban is not being treated as the international pariah that it should be; the country continues to be a full member of the International Cricket Council, for example, despite not having a national women’s team that is a requirement of membership. After withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021, the previous Conservative government relocated just 2,000 Afghans through its resettlement schemes, despite pledging to bring 20,000 – including female human rights activists. Afghan women are right to feel as if the west has abandoned them, and is effectively ignoring their brutal oppression.
After a campaign involving Afghan women and international human rights organisations, the UN special rapporteur has recommended that the UN codify the crime against humanity of “gender apartheid” in international law. This would not only strengthen the normative legal framework around the extreme oppression of women and girls based on their sex; it would place more of a duty on other countries to prevent and punish those like the Taliban who enforce it. This proposal will be discussed by the UN general assembly’s legal committee next month.
Countries must heed this call, and our government must do everything within its sphere of influence to ensure that this happens.
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