On March 8, the world celebrated International Women’s Day. At the same time, the 67th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women was meeting in New York from March 6-17, on the theme “Innovation and Technological Change, and Education in the Digital Age for the Achievement of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of All Women and Girls.”
The focus of this year’s conference is “problems to be addressed and opportunities to be leveraged to achieve gender equality and empowerment of women and girls in rural areas.” Within the same dynamic, UN member states are organizing events, roundtables, policy debates, and discussions on equality to mark this International Women’s Day.
Menial status
Yet there is one country where, since August 15, 2021, being a woman is considered a sin, if not a crime: Afghanistan. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan ceased to be a democratic republic and became a terrorist den. Since the Taliban took power, Afghanistan has changed its colors. It’s now a country in which the population lives under the harshest of conditions, and where women and girls are suffering.
Since the capture of Kabul, the Republic has become the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan led by the supreme leader of the Taliban, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. The Afghan Constitution of January 3, 2004, was drafted during President Hamid Karzai’s first term, its introduction guaranteeing compliance with the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This constitution has been frozen. Like any dictatorial power, the Taliban rule by decree, decrees that are essentially aimed at keeping women at a menial status.
While Article 22 of the 2004 Constitution proclaimed that “the citizens of Afghanistan, both men and women, have equal rights and duties before the law,” in March 2022 the Taliban announced a ban on girls’ secondary schools and deprived nearly 3.5 million Afghan teenage girls of an education.
whipping and torture
A few months later, on December 20, 2022, they banned them from access to public and private universities. But that wasn’t all. On May 7, 2022, they made the full-face veil compulsory in public, before banning women and girls from parks, public baths and from traveling alone.
They now require them to wear masks during television broadcasts, recommend whipping girls and women for wearing jeans, forbid them to work with NGOs, and arrest, beat and torture those who stand up to them and demand their rights.
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Ministries have not escaped these radical changes. Thousands of female employees have been fired because they are women, others are working from home, and some have been asked to send a male family member to work in their place.
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