The Taliban announced new laws that ban women’s voices and faces in public in Afghanistan, alarming women and women’s rights activists around the world.
According to ABC News and Amu TV, the laws decree that women must cover their entire bodies, including their faces, and forbid women to speak with or be seen with any males outside of their husbands and immediate family members. Women are also banned from reading aloud and singing.
Beyond the excessively restrictive rules on female dress and behaviour that has been likened to ISIS behaviour, the Taliban’s laws include bans on playing music, recreational activities, shaving of beards, and publication of images of living beings. Enforcing these laws is the Talbian’s Vice and Virtue Ministry, the same Ministry that was active under Taliban rule from 1996–2001, that holds significant power in determining punishment as officials see fit.
“We fully expected this. It has long been clear to Afghan women that the Taliban’s intention was to restore the same system of gender apartheid that they established back in the 1990s, which I lived under,” says Murwarid Ziayee, Senior Director with Right to Learn Afghanistan.
“They are merely formalizing rules that were already being enforced, restricting how women dress, behave, and move about. There will be more to come.”
Right to Learn Afghanistan is among a large network of organizations and activists pushing for the codification of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity under international law. The movement for the recognition of gender apartheid is calling for justice and accountability mechanisms that would make it possible, for instance, to prosecute Taliban leaders.
“The publication of these new rules, among the very limited efforts the de facto authorities have made to date in the legal sphere, make it clear that they fear no consequences for their actions. This is a clear sign that the international community’s approach to engaging with the Taliban is not working,” said Lauryn Oates, Executive Director of Right to Learn Afghanistan.
“These latest restrictions come soon after the recent meeting between the Taliban with the UN and international community in Doha in June, which excluded Afghan women, civil society, opposition groups, and any non-Taliban actors from representing the interests of Afghanistan.”
Right to Learn Afghanistan is calling for the full restoration of equal rights for women and girls in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s discriminatory rules have stripped women of virtually all their freedoms, and the Taliban’s hostility towards women has led to impunity for crimes against women, with deadly consequences for women and girls. Afghan Witness recently recorded 332 reported cases of femicide since the Taliban took power, over half of which were perpetrated by Taliban members, in addition to rising sexual violence, which has become systemic under Taliban rule.
