The Taliban’s announcement that it is reinstating the public stoning of women to death was made possible by the silence of the international community, human rights groups said. Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organization Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement condemned Afghan women to a return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.
“With this announcement by the Taliban leader, a new chapter of private punishments and burying Afghan women in isolation has begun,” said Arefi.
“Now no one is standing by them to save them from Taliban punishments. The international community has chosen to remain silent in the face of these violations of women’s rights.” The Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, announced over the weekend that the group would begin implementing its interpretation of Sharia law in Afghanistan, including reintroducing public flogging and stoning of women for adultery.
In an audio broadcast on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan Radio Television last Saturday, Akhundzada said: “We will flog the women…we will stone them in public (for adultery). “You can call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone them or flog them for adultery because they are against your democratic principles,” he said, adding: “But I represent Allah and you represent Satan.”
He justified this move as a continuation of the Taliban’s fight against Western influences. “The Taliban’s work did not end with the takeover of Kabul, it just began,” he said.
The news was greeted with horror but not surprise by Afghan women’s rights groups, who say the rollback of all remaining rights and protections for the country’s 14 million women and girls is now almost complete. Sahar Fetrat, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “Two years ago they didn’t have the courage they have today to vow to stone women to death in public; now they have.
“They have tested their draconian policies one by one, and they have reached this point because there is no one to hold them accountable for the abuses. Through the bodies of Afghan women, the Taliban demand and command moral and social orders. We should all be warned that if it is not stopped, more and more decisions like this will come.”
Since taking power in August 2021, the Taliban have dissolved Afghanistan’s Western-backed constitution and suspended existing criminal and penal laws, replacing them with their rigid and fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia law. They also banned female lawyers and judges, targeting many of them because of their work under the previous government.
Samira Hamidi, Amnesty International’s Afghanistan campaigner, said: “Over the past two and a half years, the Taliban have dismantled institutions that provided services to Afghan women. “However, their latest endorsement of publicly stoning women to death is a flagrant violation of international human rights laws, including Cedaw (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women).”
Hamidi said that Afghan women are now effectively powerless to defend themselves against persecution and injustice. In the past year alone, Taliban-appointed judges have ordered 417 public floggings and executions, according to Afghan Witness, a research group that monitors human rights in Afghanistan. Of these, 57 were women.
Most recently, in February, the Taliban publicly executed people in stadiums in Jawzjan and Ghazni provinces. The militant group invited people to witness the executions and punishments as a “lesson”, but banned filming or photography, The Guardian writes.
