Kabul, (Asian independent) Nasir Andisha, Afghanistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, said that all efforts by the international community to engage with the Taliban regime in Kabul in the past 10 months were “approaching a dead end”.
While addressing the 50th annual UN Human Rights session in Geneva, Andisha said: “In the past 10 months, the international community is using every possible mean to engage with the Taliban, but it appears to become a dead end filled with broken promises and deep disappointments.
“The violent extremist group have removed, decree by decree, every fundamental rights and liberties of the citizens of Afghanistan. Women cannot participate in political life and are not represented in the government,women have become invisible in public life.
“As the conflict resumed in several parts of the country,gruesome reports of violations of the IHL including extrajudicial killings, torture, displacement, denial of access to medical facilities killing of war wounded, surfaced.”
At the session, countries and representatives of human rights organisations discussed the state of the world’s interactions with the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate regime, the “systematic exclusion of women from society”, and the “deteriorating human rights situation”, TOLO News reported.
“We want to speak to the Taliban ourselves, we know what our people need… I call on the de facto authorities to honor their commitments to women’s rights to urgently create a meaningful dialogue with Afghan women and to listen to their voices…,” said Michelle Bachelet, the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
She said that the Taliban’s recent acts constituted an “institutionalised, systematic’ oppression of Afghan women”.
Bachelet explained that the Taliban’s policy toward women is alarming, and that women currently have no opportunity to engage in public gatherings.
Also addressing the session, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “In Afghanistan, the Taliban have appointed a government of men, closed girls’ schools, banned women from showing their faces in public and restricted their rights even to leave their own homes. Nearly 20 million Afghan women and girls are being silenced and erased from sight.”
