The United Nations and various human rights groups and activists strongly condemned a new measure by the Taliban regime to further suppress women’s rights in Afghanistan after it introduced a new, draconian law forbidding women from showing their faces or even speaking when outside of their homes.
The Taliban’s new decree bans women’s voices from being heard by men outside their family. This regime has progressively banned women from work, education, travel, media, and public life, reducing their existence to mere reproductive functions with no voice or face. pic.twitter.com/NwULdOZfAQ
— Habib Khan (@HabibKhanT) August 21, 2024
The Taliban recently published a series of new “vice and virtue” approved by the regime’s Supreme Leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. Some of these new laws state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.
The new laws also state that women’s voices are deemed to be potential instruments of vice. Under the new restrictions, women will not be allowed to speak in public, and they must not be heard singing or reading aloud, even from inside their houses.
“Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body,” the new laws state.
I do not understand this culture..
I don't want to understand it either..— Thorndyke (@thorndyk3_nft) August 23, 2024
Under the new laws, Afghan women will also not be allowed to look directly at men if they are not related by blood or marriage. Women or girls who fail to comply with the new laws can be arrested, imprisoned, and punished in a manner deemed appropriate by Taliban officials in charge of upholding the new laws.
But these new vice and virtue laws do not only cover Afghanistan’s 14 million women and girls. For instance, taxi drivers will be punished if they agree to drive a woman who is without a suitable male escort, and Afghan men will also be required to cover their bodies from their navels when outside their homes.
Before the new “vice and virtue” laws, Afghan women and girls were already banned from attending secondary school, banned from almost every form of paid employment, banned from visiting and entering various public spaces such as parks, forbidden from entering gyms and attending beauty salons, and forced to follow a strict Islamic dress code.
Taliban sounding gayer and gayer everyday
— wheatpenny (@NotConcerned18) August 23, 2024
Earlier this year, the Taliban also reintroduced public flogging and stoning women as punishment for adultery, reminiscent of their first stint in power from 1996 until the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
After seizing power from the Western-backed Islamic Republic, the Taliban regime has imposed what critics and human rights organizations call a “gender apartheid” where women and girls are excluded from almost every aspect of public life and denied access to the country’s justice system.
The new “vice and virtue” laws were met with horror and condemnation from human rights activists and organizations, as well as the United Nations.
Afghan women are boldly countering Taliban’s New Draconian law by singing out louder than ever !#MyVoiceIsNotForbiden #UntiedAgainstGenderApartheid pic.twitter.com/50g6qvXkHx
— Nilofar Ayoubi (@NilofarAyoubi) August 27, 2024
Roza Otunbayeva, who serves as the United Nations’ special representative for Afghanistan, condemned the new laws, describing them as an extension of the “intolerable restrictions” already imposed on Afghan women and girls following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021.
“It is a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future, where moral inspectors have discretionary powers to threaten and detain anyone based on broad and sometimes vague lists of infractions,” Otunbayeva said in a statement. “It extends the already intolerable restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and girls, with even the sound of a female voice outside the home apparently deemed a moral violation.”
“It is concerning that international organizations, particularly the United Nations and the European Union, instead of standing against these inhumane practices, are trying to normalize relations with the Taliban,” Shukria Barakzai, a former Afghan parliamentarian who once served as the country’s ambassador to Norway, said. “They are, in a way, whitewashing this group, disregarding the fact that the Taliban are committing widespread human rights violations.”
