The Taliban’s supreme chief has claimed in a uncommon audio message that his extremely hardline regime, which has saved women and girls out of faculties and workplaces, has ensured their rights higher than any earlier authorities.
Hibatullah Akhundzada, the chief of the Taliban-led Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan since 2021, stated his regime doesn’t marry off girls and widows by pressure – a declare countered by girls activists witnessing the crimes on the bottom in Afghanistan.
“We’ve issued a six-principle decree relating to girls’s rights. The earlier governments haven’t offered the rights of girls. We stated don’t marry girls by pressure, don’t violate mahr [amount paid by groom to the bride at the time of marriage as a traditional gift], don’t pressure girls for nikah, don’t marry a widow by pressure. We give girls the heritage,” Mr Akhundzada stated, in line with Tolo information on Thursday.
He claimed that up to now, the Taliban haven’t applied the Islamic punishment methodology of Hudud, which incorporates amputation, flogging, stoning and demise in opposition to crimes deemed excessive. These punishments have been predominant within the Taliban’s earlier regime within the 1990s.
“Tomorrow, we’ll implement hudud and the ladies will probably be stoned in public. Tomorrow, we’ll implement hudud and can lash [people] in public. All of those are in distinction with democracy. For every, you have to to struggle and battle,” he stated within the audio message introduced in Kandahar.
Mr Akhundzada claimed that earlier governments in Afghanistan didn’t take note of the rights of girls.
However the nonprofit Human Rights Watch stated the truth was removed from what Mr Akhundzada claimed. There was a spike in compelled marriages after the group stormed to energy in August 2021.
“As at all times, we must always look to the Taliban’s actions, not their phrases – particularly as a result of we now have seen them inform outrageous lies about their strategy to girls’s rights, time and again. What we all know from their conduct on the bottom is that there are credible experiences of great will increase in little one and compelled marriage because the Taliban took over,” stated Heather Barr, affiliate director of girls’s rights division on the Human Rights Watch.
“We additionally know that widows – and girls normally – have virtually no entry to justice, so any rights they may have on paper are just about meaningless,” she advised The Impartial.
The Taliban, she added, appear to see girls and women as “the property of their male kin, and they won’t tolerate any system that stops males from with the ability to do no matter they like with the ladies and women they ‘personal’”.
Ms Barr identified that these claims are hardly a shock “when one of many first issues the Taliban did after taking energy was to systematically dismantle your complete system that had been put in tempo to guard girls from gender-based violence, from shelters to authorized and social providers to specialised courts and prosecution items, and certainly the 2009 Legislation on Elimination of Violence Towards Girls”.
Sharing the pictures of a 15-year-old’s marriage with an aged man, Afghan girls’s rights activist Maryam Marof Arwin stated that the Taliban’s blatant edicts issued from the mouth of Mr Akhundzada “disregard precisely these rights and result in hundreds of crimes in opposition to girls”.
A minor woman married off to an aged man in Afghanistan
(Sourced/ The Impartial)
She confirmed that nothing has progressed for girls beneath the Taliban rule and added that they have been prohibited from travelling with out a male guardian. Girls have been now being coerced into carrying the hijab. These actions signify a transparent violation of girls’s rights and have been met with widespread condemnation.
“This solely deceives the worldwide neighborhood and the United Nations for interacting with this group. All of the worldwide stakeholders and the UN officers ought to come to see intently in Afghanistan how a lot the crime of this barbaric group has elevated daily,” stated Ms Marof Arwin, the pinnacle of Afghanistan Girls and Youngsters Strengthen Welfare Organisation and Purple Saturdays motion.
Zahra Joya, an Afghan journalist and editor-in-chief of Rukhshaana media, a information web site reporting on Afghanistan, says she has experiences of Taliban males having not simply second however third marriages within the nation.
“We’ve loads of paperwork to show this declare. It’s not that the Taliban have achieved an incredible job on girls’s rights. It’s completely the other of what they’re saying. As a journalist, as a girl, I’m at all times involved with the folks, it’s completely a lie,” she advised The Impartial.
She added: “They’re arresting girls, they’re forcing girls to remain at house, there’s no schooling, no work, even no house for them to breathe recent air. It’s all that I’ve to say, all of the Taliban management is saying is a lie.”
In September 2021, a month after US and Nato troops withdrew from Afghanistan following twenty years of warfare, the Taliban introduced that women have been barred from learning past sixth grade.
They prolonged this schooling ban to universities in December 2022. The Taliban have defied international condemnation and warnings that the restrictions will make it virtually unimaginable for them to achieve recognition because the nation’s professional rulers.