Throughout 2022, the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan introduced and enforced some of the worst gender-based discriminatory policies seen anywhere in the world.
At the start of the new academic year in March, the Taliban announced an indefinite ban on secondary schools for girls, depriving some 3.5 million teenagers an education. Earlier this week, it was announced that public and private universities across the country were being closed to female students until further notice. Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is the only country where girls are banned from schools because of their gender.
In April, the Taliban fired thousands of female government employees who were instructed to stay at home under the promise they would be paid their salaries. The Taliban stopped paying the salaries in April.
The same month, every woman without a male chaperone was prohibited from boarding planes at Kabul airport. Prior to this, the Taliban had banned women from long road travel without a male relative.
In May, the Taliban ordered every woman to wear a face mask when appearing on television, making Afghanistan the only country to enforce such a rule for public and private television channels.
The same month, human rights organizations warned about a sharp rise in child marriage cases, while an official of the Taliban’s Islamic morality police told VOA that girls could be married when they reach puberty. Under the new rule, girls as young as 13 can be given in marriage to a man of any age.
Next, the Taliban ordered all women to cover their faces and bodies in public.
The social restrictions were followed by the exclusion of women from a grand assembly in Kabul in July, in which Taliban leaders sought domestic legitimacy from men-only representatives from across Afghanistan. A senior Taliban official said that in the national decision-making, women were represented by men.
The fall of the Afghan Republic in August 2021, ushering in the Taliban’s return to power, marked the end of a constitutional system that guaranteed equal rights for all males and females in Afghanistan.
In the Taliban’s so-called Islamic emirate, where citizens have no voting rights, women’s rights are exclusively decided by male Taliban leaders who are only accountable to Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. Akhundzada’s word is law, and he has proclaimed himself accountable only to God.
On the one-year anniversary of the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan, the United Nations and human rights groups warned that the Islamist regime was systematically erasing women from the public sphere.
“Despite initial promises that women would be allowed to exercise their rights within Sharia law — including the right to work and to study — the Taliban has systematically excluded women and girls from public life,” the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, also known as U.N. Women, said in a statement on August 15.
In October, Taliban authorities restricted certain professional studies for new female university students. Under the new directive, female students were barred from selecting civil engineering, journalism, veterinary, agriculture and geology studies in the annual university entry exams.
