Afghan Women’s Rights Remain on the Periphery of Talks with Taliban

Publishers: Alliance for Peacebuilding, Mina’s List, VOICE, and Women’s Refugee Commission

Publication date: January 27th, 2022

Abstract: Over the past six months, the Taliban has targeted and terrorized the women and girls of Afghanistan, swiftly reimposing draconian measures that limit their freedom and undermine their safety. In the past few weeks alone, numerous reports have emerged of women human rights defenders being detained, tortured, and killed for their activism. Despite public rhetoric claiming support for Afghan women and girls, the world has largely watched as the Taliban dramatically rolled back their rights by decades.

Earlier this week, Norway convened Taliban leaders, diplomats primarily from Western countries, and other delegates for three days of talks on humanitarian aid and human rights in Afghanistan. However, Norway evidently failed to establish any preconditions for the Taliban’s participation, such as ceasing the political detention of Afghan women activists or guaranteeing the free exercise of women’s and girls’ human rights and their access to critical humanitarian assistance.

We call on the U.S. Government to lead the international community in demanding that the Taliban immediately take the following steps, which must also be a precondition for any future discussions in relation to peace, humanitarian assistance, and human rights:

• Immediately release all women activists and political prisoners and cease the intimidation, detention, and abuse of Afghan women;

• End Taliban-driven harassment and attacks on women and girls for exercising their basic human rights to employment, education, speech, and control over their lives, bodies, and finances, and reverse policies and practices that limit these rights; and

• Allow for the operation of an independent and impartial monitoring mechanism that incorporates the perspectives of survivors, including women, of Taliban abuse (or abuse by their representatives), to investigate the Taliban’s political imprisonment of protesters and other acts that might rise to the level of war crimes, crimes against humanity, atrocities, or grave human rights abuses.

Finally, and most critically, we urgently call upon the international community to engage a diversity of Afghan women leaders as partners and peers and demand their full, equal, and meaningful participation in any and all future talks on Afghanistan.