New Taliban Laws Turn Women Into ‘Faceless Shadows’: UN Human Rights Chief

Last week, the Taliban banned women’s voices and bare faces in public under new laws in Afghanistan.

Afghan women walk on a street in Kabul, Afghanistan, on May 9, 2022. Ali Khara/Reuters

United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk has urged the Taliban to repeal several laws passed last week, saying that they reduce women in Afghanistan to “faceless, voiceless shadows.”

The laws, described by the Taliban as discouraging vice and promoting virtue, ban women’s voices and faces in public.

They were implemented on Aug. 22, after they were approved by Afghanistan’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

In a press briefing on Tuesday, Türk said the laws cemented “policies that completely erase women’s presence in public, silencing their voices and depriving them of their individual autonomy, effectively attempting to render them into faceless, voiceless shadows.”

The Austrian-born lawyer, who has been the UN high commissioner for human rights since October 2022, said this is “utterly intolerable.”

In a statement on the UN’s website, a spokesperson for Türk said the legislation “reinforces a number of existing restrictions that violate [women’s] fundamental human rights, including their freedom of movement, their freedom of expression, and their right to live free from discrimination.”

The laws require women to wear clothing that completely covers their bodies from head to toe, including their faces; prohibit transport providers from transporting women unless they are accompanied by a male relative; and ban women’s voices from being heard in public, the spokesperson said.

The UN said the legislation was vaguely defined but also affects a person’s right to practice religion.

The Taliban, a Sunni Muslim organization, considers not only Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism to be heresy, but also other Islamic denominations and groups, such as Shia Muslims and the Ahmadiyya Muslim community.

The UN said it was also concerned because the law gives “state agents broad, discretionary powers to detain people, impose punishments on them, or refer matters to courts.”

After U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban retook Kabul, they set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” which created the laws.

The media in Afghanistan is now banned from publishing any images of human beings, male or female.

The UN said the laws are in “clear violation of Afghanistan’s obligations under international human rights law.”

A convoy of Taliban security personnel is seen moving along the streets as they celebrate the third anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, in Herat on August 14, 2024. Mustafa Noori/Middle East Images via AFP

Earlier this month another UN agency, UNESCO, accused the Taliban of deliberately depriving 1.4 million girls of schooling in Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law, or sharia, is that girls should not be educated beyond the sixth grade.

In response to the criticism of the new laws, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid issued a statement in which he said, “We urge a thorough understanding of these laws and a respectful acknowledgment of Islamic values. To reject these laws without such understanding is, in our view, an expression of arrogance.”

Reuters contributed to this report.