The international community must step up to hold the Taliban accountable for human rights abuses in Afghanistan, a year after the militant Islamist group seized control of the country and curtailed the rights of women and girls, says a Humans right’s defender.
“Honestly, this last year has been a complete, never-ending nightmare,” Heather Barr, associate director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, told CTV National News. “Women have been stripped of all their rights, and girls too.”
She also took aim at countries, including Canada, that claim to have a foreign policy that supports women’s rights but are not pushing hard enough to bring about the change that is needed.
“If your feminist foreign policy doesn’t mean standing up and providing leadership and taking practical steps to try to address the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world right now, which is Afghanistan, what does your feminist foreign policy mean?” barr said.
The Taliban celebrated the first anniversary on Monday since the group seized the Afghan capital of Kabul.
The seizure of the Afghan capital came as the US prepared to withdraw the last remaining troops from the country, a move that would prove chaotic as Afghans rushed to Kabul International Airport in a desperate attempt to flee.
The United States would finally withdraw its forces from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021, ending its 20-year war in the country and the longest in US history.
With millions in Afghanistan facing food shortages, teenage girls are also barred from going to school and women must cover themselves from head to toe in public, showing only their eyes.
In addition to banning girls from attending secondary school, Barr says the Taliban has limited access to work for women, with some also losing wages due to the country’s economic crisis.
The Taliban have also prevented women from seeing male health professionals, Barr added, and have “dismantled” systems to protect women from gender-based violence.
“We have seen women protesting these policies on Saturday,” she said, “but the Taliban’s response to those protests has been absolutely brutal, including arresting, kidnapping and abusing women and forcing them into false confessions.”
Barr wrote a letter, published Monday by the online news agency Rukhshana Mediain which he apologized to his country, the United States and others who promised to uphold the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan but later broke that promise.
“The world has turned the page too easily on Afghanistan,” he wrote.
Barr called the response of the UN and countries around the world to human rights violations against Afghan women and girls “weak.”
She urged the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies to put pressure on the Taliban to ensure that their officials are held accountable, whether through travel bans or other sanctions, for violating the rights of women and girls.
“The Taliban cannot kill the spirit of Afghan girls and women, and the world owes them its support,” Barr said. “The road is long and brutally hard, but I know you fight every day. We see your courage.”
Check out the interview with Heather Barr at the top of the article. With archives from CTVNews.ca Web Reporter Rhythm Sachdeva and The Associated Press.