Afghanistan

The Taliban on Wednesday said their decision to forbid local women from working for the United Nations in Afghanistan is an internal matter that all parties should respect.

The UN has launched an operational review in Afghanistan, and told national staff to remain at home, following the decision by the Taliban de facto authorities to ban Afghan women from working with the Organization. 

“Our colleagues on the ground at the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) received word of an order by the de facto authorities that bans female national staff members of the UN from working,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, told reporters at UN Headquarters during the regular daily briefing.

The United Nations has renewed its call for Afghanistan's Taliban to immediately reopen schools to teenage girls, saying the de facto authorities have no justification for denying the right to education on any grounds, including religion or tradition.

The Security Council today adopted two resolutions concerning Afghanistan, both unanimously, one of which extended the mandate of the United Nations special political mission for one year, while the other requested an independent assessment of — and recommendations for — efforts to address that country’s challenges.

Afghanistan under the Taliban remains the “most repressive country in the world [for] women’s rights”, the senior UN official in Kabul told the Security Council on Wednesday, while nevertheless voicing a nuanced position on the importance of continuing to engage with the group.

A report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council Monday accuses Afghanistan’s de facto Taliban rulers of pursuing a policy “tantamount to gender apartheid."

A new government watchdog report details how poor planning in the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, after years of inadequate oversight, contributed to the rapid collapse of the Western-backed government as the Taliban closed in on Kabul.

Climate change and the economic downturn continue to fuel the crisis in Afghanistan, and there have been no “encouraging developments” towards getting girls back into classrooms, a senior UN official said on Tuesday. 

[…] During the reporting period, international attention on Afghanistan was focused predominately on the elevated humanitarian needs in the country and the further and drastic restrictions imposed on the lives of Afghan women and girls.