Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai decried the state of girls’s rights in Afghanistan as “gender apartheid” on Sunday and steered Muslim leaders to talk out in opposition to the Taliban govt’s repressive insurance policies on girls and women’ schooling. “Merely put, the Taliban in Afghanistan don’t see ladies as human beings,” she mentioned, talking in Islamabad all through a summit on advancing ladies’ schooling in Islamic nations, arranged by way of the Group of Islamic Cooperation and the Muslim Global League.The Pakistani schooling activist added there was once “not anything Islamic” concerning the govt’s insurance policies, which ban teenage ladies from going to university past the 6th grade and ladies from attending college.Yousafzai, 27, additionally steered the attendees, which integrated dozens of ministers and students from Muslim international locations, to “brazenly problem and denounce” the Taliban by way of spotting gender apartheid as a criminal offense in opposition to humanity beneath world felony regulation. “In Afghanistan, a whole era of ladies shall be robbed of its long term,” she mentioned. “As Muslim leaders, now’s the time to lift your voice, use your energy.”Gender professional and Wilson Middle Fellow Gaisu Yari advised NBC Information that “Malala took a daring step by way of enticing with Muslim leaders, working out that their affect can have an important have an effect on when addressing the Taliban.”
Afghan ladies weave carpets at a manufacturing facility at the outskirts of Kabul on Nov. 11.Wakil Kohsar / AFP by way of Getty ImagesAfghan representatives didn’t attend the summit. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid declined to remark, telling NBC Information, “We don’t wish to touch upon Malala Yousafzai’s remarks about us.”The Taliban has said that it’s going to use its personal interpretation of Afghan tradition and Islamic regulation, referred to as Sharia, to steer its insurance policies on ladies’s rights.Afghanistan is now the one nation on the earth that bars girls and women — just about 1.5 million Afghans — from getting access to secondary and better schooling. Because it swept again to energy in 2021, the Taliban has systematically stripped girls and women in their elementary rights by way of passing regulations that prohibit get right of entry to to schooling, paintings and freedoms of motion and speech. In December, it banned ladies from coaching as midwives and nurses, successfully finishing ladies’s most effective to be had get right of entry to to additional schooling and striking ladies and kids’s lives in peril.Previous this month, it handed any other order that forestalls residential constructions from having home windows the place ladies can also be noticed whilst at house.For girls, residing in Afghanistan is “comparable to residing in a jail” Yari mentioned.
Afghan college ladies in Kabul attend magnificence at the first day of the brand new college 12 months in 2023.Ebrahim Noroozi / AP fileNo overseas govt has officially identified the Taliban because of its restrictive stance on ladies, whilst the United Countries has time and again denounced the federal government.Whilst gender apartheid has now not but been officially codified in world regulation, ladies activists, mavens and the ladies’s motion in Afghanistan contend that the Taliban’s rule over the last 3 years has proven transparent traits of the follow, Yari mentioned.Criminal mavens outline gender apartheid because the “systemic, institutionalized discrimination and segregation of people in accordance with their gender, designed to care for male dominance by way of controlling ladies.”In September 2023, the world prison professional and civil society consultant Karima Bennoune advised the U.N. Safety Council that “what has been attempted for the reason that Taliban returned to energy isn’t running” and steered the U.N. to wield all to be had measures to urge the Taliban to opposite its path.She added that codifying the crime into world regulation can be one of the crucial efficient techniques to take action.
