UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed yesterday discussed women’s rights with Afghanistan’s “foreign minister” after the Taliban banned women from working in aid organizations and banned women and girls from attending schools and universities.
Mohammed also met with UN officials, aid organizations and Afghan women “to assess the situation, express solidarity and discuss ways to promote and protect the rights of women and girls,” said UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq. , in New York.
In those conversations, Mohammed emphasized “the need to uphold human rights, especially for women and girls” and was encouraged “by exceptions” to the ban on aid workers, Haq said. These exceptions would allow the resumption of some work in areas such as health.
Prohibition based on Islamic dress code
On December 24, the Taliban government ordered local and foreign aid organizations to stop hiring women until further notice, after banning women from universities.
The Taliban justified the order by saying some women did not adhere to their interpretation of the Islamic dress code. Many aid organizations, some of which carry out humanitarian work under contracts with the United Nations, stopped operating after the ban.
Schallenberg: “No recognition” with such a policy
Last week, eleven member countries of the UN Security Council called on the Taliban to immediately end all oppression of women and girls. When asked by ORF.at, the Austrian Foreign Ministry also said that recent Taliban decisions to exclude women from universities and ban them from working in humanitarian NGOs were “unacceptable”.
Austria and the EU would not abandon the Afghan civilian population as long as “principled humanitarian aid” that directly benefits all those in need is possible. The Taliban systematically deprived the population, especially women and girls, as well as religious and ethnic minorities, of their basic human rights. “With such a retrograde policy, there cannot and will not be any recognition of the Taliban.”
After the militant Islamist Taliban took power in Afghanistan by force on August 15, 2021, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) initially said in an interview with ZIB2 that radical Islamists should be “judged by their actions”. “We have to see how the incredibly volatile situation develops,” said the foreign minister. But he cannot see the future.
The past year and a half has shown that the Taliban is not prepared to create an inclusive political system, the Foreign Ministry said.