AFGHANISTAN APPEAL

AFGHANISTAN APPEAL

The shocking images of fleeing civilians arriving from that country after the Taliban entered Kabul cannot leave us indifferent and inert.

Thousands of Afghans, particularly women, academics, journalists, civil society activists and human rights defenders, feel at risk of reprisals by the fundamentalists.

Numerous testimonies by women from villages in the provinces, which gradually fell into the hands of the Taliban rebels, and various international organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, document the reintroduction of fiercely liberticidal laws on women in the conquered areas, such as the ban on leaving the house unless accompanied by a relative of age and forced marriages.

The rights gained by Afghan women over the past 20 years, particularly in education, employment and political participation, are now under serious threat.

Therefore, in the face of the risk of events spiralling disastrously into an even more tragic direction, we call on the highest international institutions, within their respective spheres of competence, to:

1. The United Nations Security Council immediately adopt a resolution calling on all parties to the Afghan conflict

(a) to comply with international human rights and international humanitarian law standards, in particular the humane treatment of civilians and detained combatants;

(b) to ensure the resumption of an intra-Afghan dialogue and the launching of a peace process involving all segments of society, with meaningful participation by Afghan women.

2. The UN Security Council reaffirms that the International Criminal Court, of which Afghanistan is a member, is obliged to prosecute – even in the present circumstances – war crimes and other atrocities that constitute crimes against humanity.

3. The European Union and the United States, currently the largest donors to Afghanistan, to make any support and recognition of institutions that might be forcibly established in Kabul conditional on the upholding of women’s rights as enshrined in the Afghan Constitution, national legislation and international law, as well as on respect for women’s equal conditions and their access to education and employment, and to make the lifting of sanctions against the Taliban conditional on this.

4. All actors in the Doha negotiation process should as a matter of priority demand that all parties to the conflict be allowed access to “humanitarian corridors” and that free and fair elections be held in Afghanistan at the end of the transition of power.