Julie Ward on the plight of Afghan women and acts of resistance
Donya was just a child when she made the long journey from Afghanistan to Europe with her brother. They found a welcome in Sweden, where Donya eventually studied law at Uppsala University. I first met Donya in 2015 when she was 18 during a child participation summer school in Switzerland. She was a Group Leader for the child rights organisation, Eurochild, and already had an impressive CV. Shortly after that, she came to job-shadow me in the European Parliament, showing a passion for active participation in politics and civil society.
If Donya were still in Afghanistan, her life would be very different. Unlike her brother she would be unable to pursue a university education and likely be subjected to public flogging for dubious crimes such as “running away from home”. She would be forced to cover her hair, to wear a burka and niqab. She would be banned from participating in sport and from speaking in public, particularly from talking to men. She would likely be married so as not to be a burden on her family and she would give birth to children in inadequate facilities with insufficient trained midwives, especially since the Taliban has recently banned women from accessing midwifery and nurse training. If she bore girl children they would be denied the right to anything but a basic primary education and even playing outside would be a risky business since the ban on women going to parks. If the harsh Taliban government have their way the very windows of her house will be boarded up to limit temptation for social interaction with neighbours and passers-by.
In today’s Afghanistan, ruled by a totalitarian theocracy, Donya’s life as a bright, ambitious, hard-working, fun-loving and politically active young woman contributing to society would be completely impossible.
Years of progress have been lost since the gun-toting Taliban militia rolled into Kabul in the summer of 2021, setting the stage for a hardline Islamist regime which has demolished human rights frameworks and curtailed the rights of women and girls in particular. Women are now absent from public life where once they held positions in government, in state institutions, in the courts, in academia, in the media and so on, heading up a range of aid and development programmes, delivering frontline services to the poorest and most marginalised communities. Many have fled, risking their lives in the process and often being sent back by unsympathetic governments (eg. Pakistan) who must surely know the dangers that await them. Others are choosing suicide due to the hopelessness of their situation. In 2024 a video of a woman being gang-raped in a Taliban jail surfaced, appearing to confirm the practice of sexual violence that lurks beneath the surface of the hardline Islamist administration.
The failure of the international community to prevent this human rights catastrophe will go down in history as one of the biggest blunders of the 21st century. So what should we do?
In early 2025, the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants for Taliban leaders over gender-based persecution, prompting Afghanistan to withdraw from the court, condemning the action as baseless and politically motivated. Meanwhile, efforts are underway to bring a case to the International Court of Justice over alleged violations of a UN anti-discrimination treaty. Unsurprisingly, an Afghan government spokesperson stated that the Taliban respect women’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic law and local customs. This fundamentalist pushback against women’s rights is also in evidence in other countries such as Iran.
Whilst international legal routes are being pursued, civil society must continue to show solidarity with Afghan women and girls and support the few brave initiatives that continue to find innovative ways to resist the Taliban’s crackdown on women’s freedoms. An excellent example is Begum TV, which was launched on International Women’s Day in 2024. This initiative broadcast from Paris reaches thousands of Afghan women and girls who tune in to follow programmes ranging from poetry to sexual and reproductive health to music and culture. Begum TV has also digitalised the entire Afghan school curriculum, so that girls can continue to educate themselves despite being almost entirely banned from public spaces.
In North East England, a recent three-month Festival of Languages featured a powerful campaign #LetAfghanGirlsLearn designed to bolster support for advocating for girls’ education amongst peers in the UK with webinars, downloadable resources and ideas for letter writing. Meanwhile, the Brighton-based “Sisters Salon” spearheaded a campaign aimed at encouraging a boycott of the England v Afghanistan ICC men’s fixture in order to draw attention to the ban on Afghan women’s participation in sport. We can all do our bit to keep Afghan women’s rights on the agenda, and we should. Their fight should also be our fight.