Rights bodies criticise absence of women in meetings on Afghanistan
Jul 31, 2023
Kabul [Afghanistan], July 31 : Several women representatives of human rights bodies have criticised the lack of female presence at the meetings discussing the situation in Afghanistan, TOLOnews reported.
A few women, who were interviewed by TOLOnews have said that women’s representation is necessary in the meetings related to Afghan conditions.
“The women who are in Afghanistan should be invited to this meeting because the main suffering of the women in Afghanistan today is felt by these women. They feel the pain better than the women abroad,” said Hamir Farhangyar, who has worked in the field of human rights and female education for several decades.
Farhangyar emphasised that the responses of other nations to the problems faced by Afghan women had not been helpful.
In reference to the meeting of the US-Afghanistan interim government in Doha, Heather Barr, associate director of Human Rights Watch's women's rights division, stated that the human rights issue should be at the top of the agenda.
“It is urgently important that human rights be at the top of the agenda for those meetings. Now we trust that would be the case given that is the core mandate for Rina Amiri,” she added.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Emirate stated that there is no problem with the presence of women’s representatives in the general meetings on Afghanistan, as per TOLOnews.
“If it is a legal discussion, or a discussion about women and their rights, under such conditions, we think about how to facilitate a Sharia and Islamic environment. But we see that some of our senior officials are meeting women again and again” said Zabiullah Mujahid, Islamic Emirate’s spokesman.
“The women want a meeting in which the decisive decisions should be taken for the destiny of women and people of Afghanistan,” said Suraya Paikan, a female defender.
This came as the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Twitter that women and girls “everywhere deserve to live with dignity and respect.”
“We will never give up fighting to ensure their fundamental human rights are upheld everywhere,” he said, TOLOnews reported.
