Taliban Talks With U.N. Go On Despite Alarm Over Exclusion of Women

Middle East|Taliban Talks With U.N. Go On Despite Alarm Over Exclusion of Women

Taliban officials attended a rare, United Nations-led league of planetary envoys to Afghanistan connected Sunday, the archetypal specified gathering Taliban representatives person agreed to prosecute in, aft organizers said Afghan women would beryllium excluded from the talks.

The two-day league successful Doha, Qatar, is the 3rd of its kind. It is portion of a United Nations-led effort, known arsenic the “Doha process,” started successful May 2023. It is meant to make a unified attack for planetary engagement with Afghanistan. Envoys from astir 25 countries and determination organizations, including the European Union, the United States, Russia and China, are attending.

Taliban officials were not invited to the archetypal gathering and refused to attend the 2nd meeting, held successful February, aft objecting to the inclusion of Afghan civilian nine groups that attended.

The league has drawn a fierce backlash successful caller days aft U.N. officials announced that Afghan women would not enactment successful discussions with Taliban officials. Human rights groups and Afghan women’s groups person slammed the determination to exclude them arsenic excessively terrible a concession by the U.N. to transportation the Taliban to prosecute successful the talks.

The determination to exclude women sets “a profoundly damaging precedent” and risks “legitimatizing their gender-based organization strategy of oppression,” Agnès Callamard, the caput wide of Amnesty International, said successful a statement referring to the Taliban’s policies toward women. “The planetary assemblage indispensable follow a wide and agreed stance: The rights of women and girls successful Afghanistan are nonnegotiable.”

Since seizing powerfulness from the U.S.-backed authorities successful 2021, Taliban authorities person systematically rolled backmost women’s rights, efficaciously erasing women from nationalist life. Women and girls are barred from getting acquisition beyond superior schoolhouse and banned from astir employment extracurricular of acquisition and wellness care, and they cannot question important distances without a antheral guardian.