Human Rights Watch (HRW) has again accused Afghanistan’s Taliban administration of squeezing space and deepening suppression of women throughout 2023. According to the organization, in addition to the long-standing deprivation of women’s fundamental rights in terms of the right to education, work, and assembly in public spaces, the suppression and detention of women have increased significantly over the past months. Human Rights Watch emphasized that the detention of protesting women including Julia Parsi and Neda Parwani, along with their family members signifies the allegations leveled by the global community against the Taliban regime.
Meanwhile, the Spokesperson for the Afghan government reciprocated the Human Rights Watch charges noting that those women leaders receive orders from outside.The accusations from global human rights advocates against Afghan interim rulers over a series of measures including the imposition of a ban on girls’ education, women’s right to jobs in certain fields including media and NGOs, along with inter-city travel without a male companion are persistent since the change of regime in August 2021.
However, the recent confirmation by the Afghan authorities regarding the arrest of several women for bad hijab has further intensified the debate in Western capitals, global think tanks, and scholarly circles, regarding the newest oppressive measures implemented by the Kabul rulers in recent weeks.Historically, Human and women’s rights are wider subjects, while different religions, faiths, communities, and societies have different philosophies and interpretations of those sane values that represent their societal ethics, religious beliefs, living traditions, and norms. Muslim society and the male-dominant Afgan tribes have altogether conflicting ideologies and social norms concerning women’s hijab, civil liberties, girls’ education and jobs, etc. Hence, each side views this phenomenon purely from its own lens while ignoring the viewpoint/perspective of the other side.
Western INGOs and Human Rights Defenders ambitiously propel the individual cases of human rights abuses in Muslim societies and make all efforts to make the victim stand against his/her society, tribe, and the entire system in the country. Western scholars term the ban on women’s hijab and the burning of the Quran as domestic legislative issues in France, and civil liberties in Norway and Sweden respectively. The accusations from Western Human rights advocates against the Taliban are genuine but the statement of the Afghan representative is also not wholly untrue. Human Rights Organizations must not have political/ strategic use of human rights issues against any particular country or group while those divine ideas must be protected equally in all parts from Europe to East Asia and South to North Pole of the world, unbiasedly in the same letter and spirit.
