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Engagement key to reform of IEA policies restricting women’s rights
The international community must continue to engage with Islamic Emirate leaders in Afghanistan despite deep disagreement with their approach to women’s rights and inclusive governance, the UN Special Representative for the country told the Security Council on Tuesday.
Roza Otunbayeva, who also heads the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), called for a “reframed engagement strategy”, expressing concern over the “lack of positive direction” in current efforts.
“The lack of trust on all sides is a serious impediment to building confidence but the doors to dialogue are still open,” she said.
“This moment, despite its problems, is an opportunity. We must ensure that the doors to dialogue are not shut.”
Otunbayeva said engagement has been significantly undermined by the more than 50 Taliban decrees aimed at eliminating women from public life and education.
“The policies that drive the exclusion of women are unacceptable to the international community,” she said.
She also cited a new UN report based on more than 500 interviews with Afghan women, 46 percent of whom said the Islamic Emirate should not be recognized under any circumstances.
“The question, however, is whether to continue engaging with the de facto authorities despite these policies, or to cease engaging because of them,” she said.
“UNAMA’s view is that we must continue to engage and to maintain a dialogue.
“Dialogue is not recognition. Engagement is not acceptance of these policies. On the contrary: dialogue and engagement are how we are attempting to change these policies.”
Otunbayeza told the Council that this engagement could be more structured and purposeful while remaining principled.
“A reframed engagement strategy must first acknowledge that the de facto authority bears responsibility for the well-being of the Afghan people, in all dimensions but especially concerning women,” she stressed.
Other components would include mechanisms to address the de facto authorities’ long-term concerns, as well as “a sincere intra-Afghan dialogue of the sort that was interrupted when the Taliban took power in August 2021.”
Additionally, “a more coherent position of the international community” would also be required, she said.
Sima Bahous, head of the UN’s gender equality agency, UN Women, also briefed the Council. She told ambassadors that Taliban decrees are costing Afghanistan roughly one billion dollars a year, which will only increase.
The edicts are also exacerbating the dire humanitarian situation in a country where more than two-thirds of the population depend on assistance to survive and some 20 million, mainly women and girls, are facing acute hunger.
She insisted that the way forward must be guided by women’s voices and the principles of the UN Charter.
Bahous recommended that the Security Council Committee that oversees sanctions against Afghanistan convene a session to examine the role it can play in responding to violations of women’s rights in the country.
“We must consider the messages we send when we frame the situation in Afghanistan purely or exclusively as a humanitarian crisis,” she further advised.
“It is an economic crisis, a mental health crisis, a development crisis, and more. And the thread that connects these different facets is the underlying women’s rights crisis. This must be the primary lens through which we understand what is going on and what we must do.”
She also urged ambassadors to fully support efforts to explicitly codify “gender apartheid” in international law.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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