カテゴリー: Women’s rights and gender equality
Afghanistan’s ‘morality police’ arrested Samira at work in Kabul – and then made the 19-year-old marry her employerIt was a normal summer morning in July last year when 19-year-old Samira* made her way to the carpet-weaving shop where she worked in Kab…
Speaking at an inaugural conference on girls’ education in the Muslim world, Malala Yousafzai decried the state of women’s and girls’ rights in Afghanistan as ‘gender apartheid’. The conference in Islamabad brought together local and international advo…
Begum TV beams educational and entertainment shows into homes of women living under strict Taliban ruleFrom a tiny television studio in Paris, 4,500 miles from Kabul, a raft of programmes geared towards women and presented by female hosts beams 24 hour…
From an exuberant mountaineering woman to a boy representing unheard refugees, here are some of the brave individuals that gave us hopeNine years ago, Cecilia Llusco was one of 11 Indigenous women who made it to the summit of the 6,088 metre-high Huayn…
Afghan students and activists condemn halt to medical courses amid warnings of women dying from lack of healthcareThe Taliban’s ban on Afghan women attending nursing and midwife courses has been condemned as “an outrageous act of ignorance” by human ri…
Made under dangerous conditions, this documentary charts how the lives of three women were turned upside down by Afghanistan’s overthrow in 2021Afghan film-maker Sahra Mani, creator of the rape-survivor documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me from 2018, b…
Since the country legalised abortion, maternal mortality rates have plummeted. But US-funded programmes and a Trump victory could reverse that progress, warn experts“One, two, three,” says Soman Rai slowly, to the click of his fingers. “Every three sec…
Activists hope a change in international law could help to address the intensifying erosion of women and girls’ rights in AfghanistanRead more: Afghan exiles on the Taliban’s gender apartheidOver the past three years, the world has watched in horror as…
What women face in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity, say activists pushing for recognition by UN Explainer: What is gender apartheid – and can anything be done to stop it?When Sima Samar and other Afghan women came up with the term “gender apart…
‘We will never stop fighting’: why Afghan women have risked their lives to attend a summit in Tirana
A conference in the Albanian capital aims to agree how women want the international community to react to the Taliban’s assault on their rights – and fight the erasure of their voicesIn the garden of a hotel on the outskirts of Tirana, Albania, a group…
Organisers of international summit hope to create pressure to reverse laws including a ban on women speaking in publicMore than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representin…
Despite the regime withdrawing even the most basic human rights of women and girls, liberal democracies have failed to take action‘So pervasive is the Taliban’s institutionalised gender oppression, and so slender are the spaces in which women and girls…
Women push back at law stating they must not sing or read aloud in public by posting videos of themselves singingAfghan women, both inside and outside the country, have posted videos of themselves singing in protest against the Taliban’s laws banning w…
New vice and virtue restrictions offer ‘a distressing vision of Afghanistan’s future’, says UNNew Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human right…