The ideological religious claims made by the Taliban have got to be “contested and directly contested,” UN Envoy for Global Education and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday told Arab News.
To that end, he has urged Muslim-majority countries’ leaders to support a delegation to the Taliban clerics in Kandahar to seek to persuade them to remove the ban on girls’ education and women’s employment “which has no basis in the Qur’an or the Islamic religion.”
Brown said that the Taliban ideology should not be regarded as a mere difference of opinion but “a difference of interpretation that has got to be contested all the time.”
Since they took control of the country in August 2021, the Taliban have issued edicts imposing widespread restrictions on the rights of women and girls, including their freedom of movement, attire and behavior, access to education, work, health and justice. This has amounted to what many have called a system of “gender apartheid.”
Worldwide support for the cause of Afghan women and girls has been insufficient to move the Taliban to reverse course.
Brown called on the international community to mobilize in greater numbers and “with renewed strength of purpose” to condemn the violation of Afghan women’s rights.
He said the denial of education to Afghan girls and employment to Afghan women is gender discrimination and it is time to declare it a crime against humanity, and for the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into the repression decreed by the Taliban regime.
“The International Criminal Court should recognize this gender discrimination as a crime against humanity and investigate it with a view to the arraignment and prosecution of those responsible,” Brown said.
Meanwhile, he called on the international community to “step up its efforts to restore the freedom of girls to go to school, women to university, to work in public places, and to enjoy basic liberties,” and to challenge “what many have called gender apartheid against girls and women.”
Over 50 of around 80 edicts issued by the Taliban explicitly target women and girls and dismantle their rights. Just recently, the Taliban regime issued additional bans on women’s and girls’ participation in university exams, and on visits to public places, including cemeteries.
The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has become the administration for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice. And the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has been dissolved.
Brown called for monitoring surveillance and reporting of the gross abuses and the violations of rights under UN conventions that have been broken: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the convention on discrimination against women; and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. He urged governments, including the UK and US, to follow the EU and sanction those who are directly responsible for these decisions to discriminate against girls and women in Afghanistan.
He also called for the release of nongovernmental organization leaders who are imprisoned for defending women’s and girls’ rights.
Brown said that the international community must show that education can get through to the people of Afghanistan, in spite of the Afghan government’s bans.
He added: “We will sponsor and fund internet learning. We will support underground schools, as well as support education for girls who are forced to leave Afghanistan and need our help to go to school.”
He told Arab News: “If the Afghan leadership were prepared to open the schools, that’s the secondary schools, and give the girls who are teenagers the chance of education and allow women to go to university, then we would bring back the aid that was available between 2001 and 2021.
“So we could do that, irrespective of recognition. We could get to a situation where we would help the Afghan girls get back to school by providing the funding that is clearly not available, before Afghanistan faces terrible issues of starvation and hardship.”
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