The Taliban are repressing Afghan women and girls with unprecedented restrictions that will put the country's future at risk, a shocked UN high commissioner for human rights warned on Monday.
Volker Turk said the new Islamic morality law, which bans women from speaking or showing their faces in public, and repressive restrictions on education and most professions were outrageous and amounted to systematic sexual persecution.
“I shudder to think of the future for Afghan women and girls,” Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Representatives for the Taliban terrorist group were not immediately available for comment, according to the Associated Press. Reports.
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The Taliban, the terrorist organization that seized control of Afghanistan in the final weeks of the U.S. and NATO withdrawal in 2021, has excluded women from most areas of public life and banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade, despite initially promising a more compassionate and moderate governance, Breitbart News reported.
It also restricts the ability of unmarried or unguarded women to work, travel and access health care, and punishes women who do not conform to the Taliban's interpretation of the hijab, an Islamic headscarf.
In Afghanistan, women are also banned from speaking or singing to strangers in public under new laws approved by the supreme leader to fight vice and promote Islamic virtue.
“I want to make clear my disgust at recent measures such as banning even eye contact between unrelated men and women and requiring women to cover their bodies from head to toe, including their faces,” Turk said.
Taliban policies were pushing Afghanistan further down a path of isolation, pain and hardship, despaired the Austrian career bureaucrat.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
