"Cats have more freedom than women in Afghanistan"

By Emily Thompson

Cats have more freedom than women in Afghanistan, Hollywood actress Meryl Streep said speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

In an appeal to the international community to stop the Taliban’s repression, the actress, speaking on Monday at an event to raise awareness of Afghan women's rights at the UN headquarters in New York, pointed out that even animals had more rights now in Afghanistan following increased restrictions on women.

In response, a Taliban spokesman said they “highly respected” women and would “never compare them to cats.”

But the Taliban is a terror group with no respect for human rights.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has documented evidence of the Taliban de facto authorities “committing extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and detentions, incommunicado detention and torture and ill-treatment against specific groups, including media workers, human rights defenders and individuals affiliated with the former government.”

UNAMA has also reported “over 1,600 cases of human rights violations committed during arrests and detentions, including torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

For these reasons and many others, Streep's comments come at an opportune time to highlight the Taliban government’s inhumanity.

In fact, just last month, the Taliban introduced a new set of “morality laws.”

Among other things, these rules demand that women’s voices can no longer be heard in public and that they are not allowed to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.

The measures add to a litany of restrictions that the regime has imposed on Afghan women and girls since returning to power three years ago.

Women are required to completely cover their faces and bodies when leaving their homes. Women and young girls are also prevented from going to schools, parks, gyms and sport clubs. There are also restrictions on the type of work that they are allowed to do.

UNAMA has also documented the Taliban committing a series of arbitrary arrests and detentions of women and girls, particularly those from ethnic and religious minority communities, based on alleged non-compliance with the imposed “Islamic dress code.” Women and girls have reportedly been forcibly taken into police vehicles, arbitrarily detained and held incommunicado while being subjected to ill-treatment.

For the Taliban to claim women are “highly respected” is a joke and an insult to Afghanistan’s women.

“Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face, she may chase a squirrel in the park,” Streep said. “A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban. A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law. The way that this culture, this society has been upended, is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world.”

Streep called on world leaders to "stop the slow suffocation" of Afghan women and girls.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the Taliban and said Afghanistan “will never take its rightful place on the global stage” without educated women and women in employment.

Efforts by the Taliban to exclude women and girls from social, economic and political spheres, including the institutionalized large-scale gender-based discrimination and violence against them, amounts to gender persecution, a crime against humanity.

This must not be allowed to continue. The international community must punish the Taliban and make them pay for their crimes.

Image: Pixabay

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