REFUGEE PROJECTS

The Guardian article "Taliban ban girls from secondary education in Afghanistan" can be used to support the factual claims and legal arguments made by the applicant. The following are relevant excerpts, as well as the link to the entire article. 

 

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"In a further sign that the recently announced Taliban government is tightening restrictions on women, the former ministry of women’s affairs building in Kabul has been handed over to the newly re-established ministry for the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue."

 

"This was the group’s feared enforcer in the 1990s, charged with beating women who violated bars on everything from going out in public without a male guardian to an obsessively prescriptive dress code that even forbade high heels."

 

"The decision on education has worrying echoes of the tactics the Taliban used in the 1990s, when they last ruled Afghanistan, to bar girls from school without issuing a formal prohibition."

 

"Education and literacy are so strongly valued in Islam that the Taliban could not ban girls schools on Islamic grounds, so they always said they would open them when security improved. It never did. They never opened the schools,' said Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who worked in Afghanistan at the time." Page 2

 

"The Taliban government is courting international recognition and funds, as Afghanistan hovers on the brink of economic collapse, and is aware that the international community is watching its treatment of women particularly closely."

 

"Despite this, its leaders have already effectively barred the majority of Afghan women from work for the last month, calling their male colleagues back into offices but saying security conditions mean it is not safe for women."

 

"That reason was used to prevent women from working for the entire five-year period the group controlled Afghanistan in the 1990s. Now, as then, only some women in the health and education sectors are back at their jobs." Pages 2-3