The Taliban authorities have further increased in recent months the restrictions imposed on women and girls in Afghanistan, especially in the areas of education and employment, denounced a UN report on Human Rights in that country on Monday.
According to the report of the UN mission in Afghanistan, which analyzed events and measures enacted between May and June, the Taliban regime’s Ministry of Public Health announced that only men will be able to undergo tests to pursue specialized medical studies.
The move follows a ban on female medical students from taking graduation exams, announced last February, and a ban on women attending universities, enacted in December 2022, according to the document.
The UN also claims to have registered cases in which the Taliban applied limitations (previously announced by the extremists) to women’s freedom of movement and access to employment.
In early May, two Afghan employees of an international non-governmental organization (NGO) were detained by Taliban forces at an airport because they were traveling without a male escort, or ‘mahram’, according to the report.
In June, a midwife was detained and interrogated for five hours by Taliban intelligence, who threatened to kill her if she continued working for an NGO. According to the report, two days later, the midwife resigned.
“Two other NGOs saw their licenses suspended by the Ministry of Economy due to the presence of employees in their offices,” the same document denounced, adding that it also registered cases of physical violence against women, including an incident in which members of the Department of Vices and Virtues hit a woman with a stick and forced her out of a public park.
Despite initial promises of a more moderate regime compared to its previous period in power in the 1990s, the Taliban have been cracking down since they regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, when US forces and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were still withdrawing from the country.
Since then, they have barred women from participating in most sectors of public life and work and stifled freedom of the press.
The Kabul regime also prohibited girls from going to school beyond the sixth grade and prohibited Afghan women from working in local and non-governmental organizations. In April, the ban was extended to employees of UN agencies operating in the country.
The measures triggered a strong international revolt, increasing the country’s isolation at a time when the Afghan economy was collapsing and the humanitarian crisis was deepening.
During the first Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, officials meted out corporal punishment and public executions of people convicted of crimes, often in sports stadiums.
In June, the Taliban carried out what is believed to be the second public execution since they returned to power.
The first occurred last December, when a man convicted of murder was executed with an assault rifle by the victim’s father in the western province of Farah, in front of hundreds of onlookers and several senior Taliban officials.
The second, executed in Kabul, was a man identified as Ajmal, convicted of the murder of five people last year.
In May, the UN declared that 274 men, 58 women and two children had been publicly flogged in the previous six months.
Source: TSF
