Witnesses reported that in recent days they saw teams affiliated with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice patrolling some of the most crowded neighborhoods in the Afghan capital, where women were arrested.
For its part, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice indicated that it “worked only to encourage the wearing of the hijab” among the population.
Ministry spokesman Saif al-Islam Khyber said: “No one was arrested, and no one was sent to prison.”
For its part, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan expressed its regret over “incidents that further contribute to the isolation of women and girls, maintaining a climate of fear and undermining the confidence of the population,” noting that it had spoken with the authorities regarding this issue.
Two experts confirmed United Nations Earlier, the Taliban had systematically restricted the human rights of women and girls in Afghanistan and stifled all aspects of their lives, adding that such treatment may amount to “gender segregation.”
In a joint report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, in 2023, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, and the Chair of the Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls, Dorothée Estrada-Tank, indicated that the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan is the worst on the global level.
Bennett stressed, “Women and girls in Afghanistan suffer from severe discrimination that may amount to gender persecution, or what is known as gender segregation, which is a crime against humanity, as the de facto authorities seem to rule by practicing systemic discrimination with the intention of subjecting women and girls to complete domination.”
Estrada-Tank, for her part, noted: “While violent reactions against the rights of women and girls have emerged in various countries and regions in recent years, no other country in the world has recorded this form of widespread, systematic and comprehensive attacks targeting the rights of women and girls, as is the case in Afghanistan.”
The two experts stressed that the decrees issued by the Taliban since they took control of the country in August 2021 have imposed widespread restrictions on the rights of women and girls, including on freedom of movement, clothing, behavior, and access to education, work, health, and justice. The restrictions also severely affected the participation of women and girls in political, public, economic, social and cultural life, and exacerbated marital and domestic violence against women and girls.
