The Taliban is repressing women and young girls in Afghanistan with unparalleled restrictions and will jeopardize the country’s future, a shocked U.N. rights chief warned Monday.
Volker Türk said new Islamic morality laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, along with oppressive restrictions on education and most jobs, were outrageous and amounted to systematic gender persecution.
“I shudder to think what is next for the women and girls of Afghanistan,” Türk told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Representatives of the Taliban terrorist were not immediately available for comment, AP reports.
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Matthew Perdie, Jack KnudsenThe Taliban terrorist organization— who took over Afghanistan in 2021 during the final weeks of U.S. and NATO withdrawal — have excluded women from most areas of public life and stopped girls from going to school beyond sixth grade, despite initial promises of a more caring, moderate rule, as Breitbart News reported.
They are also restricting women’s access to work, travel and health care if they are unmarried or don’t have a male guardian, and punishing those who don’t comply with the Taliban’s interpretation of hijab, or Islamic headscarf.
Women in Afghanistan are also banned from speaking in public to men they do not know or singing under new laws approved by the supreme leader in efforts to combat vice and promote Islamic virtue.
“I want to make clear my abhorrence of these latest measures, which include forbidding even eye contact between women and men who are not related and imposing mandatory covering for women from head to toe, including their faces,” Türk said.
Taliban policies are propelling Afghanistan further down a path of isolation, pain and hardship, the Austrian career bureaucrat despaired.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
