The United Nations on Sunday known as for Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to reopen colleges to ladies in grades 7-12, calling the anniversary of their exclusion from highschool “shameful.”
The UN mentioned it’s more and more involved that the coverage, along with different restrictions on primary freedoms, will contribute to a deepening of the nation’s financial disaster within the type of higher insecurity, poverty and isolation.
“This is a tragic, shameful, and entirely avoidable anniversary,” mentioned Markus Potzel, performing head of the UN mission in Afghanistan.
A yr after the Taliban took energy in Afghanistan, hard-liners seem to carry sway within the Taliban-led authorities. Teenage women are nonetheless barred from faculty and girls are required to cowl themselves from head to toe in public, with solely their eyes exhibiting. The spiritual group has didn’t ship on varied guarantees to allow women’ return to the classroom. The ban targets grades 7-12, primarily impacting women age 12 to 18.
The Taliban re-opened excessive colleges to boys whereas instructing women to stay at house. The U.N. estimates that greater than one million women have been barred from attending highschool over the previous yr.
“The ongoing exclusion of girls from high school has no credible justification and has no parallel anywhere in the world. It is profoundly damaging to a generation of girls and to the future of Afghanistan itself,” mentioned Potzel, who can be the U.N. secretary-general’s deputy particular consultant for Afghanistan.
To mark the Sunday anniversary, 50 women despatched a letter entitled “A Year of Darkness: A Letter from Afghan girls to heads of Muslim countries and other world leaders.” The women hail from the capital Kabul, japanese Nangarhar province and northern Parwan province.
“The past year, we have been denied human rights, such as the right to attain an education, the privilege to work, the liberty to live with dignity, freedom, mobility and speech, and the right to determine and decide for ourselves,” Azadi, an 18-year-old Eleventh-grade scholar from Kabul, mentioned within the letter. The women named within the letter gave solely their first names.
The U.N. mentioned the denial of schooling violates essentially the most elementary rights of women and girls. The world physique mentioned it will increase the danger of marginalization, violence, exploitation and abuse towards women and is a part of a broader vary of discriminatory insurance policies and practices focusing on girls and women for the reason that de facto authorities assumed energy in the summertime of 2021.
The U.N. once more known as upon the Taliban to reverse the slew of measures they’ve launched proscribing Afghan girls and women’ enjoyment of their primary rights and freedoms.
Since taking energy, the Taliban have struggled to control and stay internationally remoted. An financial downturn has pushed hundreds of thousands extra Afghans into poverty and starvation because the stream of overseas help has slowed to a trickle.