Afghan government fails to protect women (female activists)

Amnesty International said Tuesday that Afghan government failed to protect Afghan women activists who are working to improve the human rights situation in their country.

According to CNN, the Amnesty International in a report called for Afghan authorities to address the number of attacks on women’s rights activists in Afghanistan.

The London-based watchdog criticized Afghan authorities in a new report released in Kabul, saying that both the Afghan government and the international community have abandoned the women activists despite the gains made in the past decade.

Female rights campaigners have been suffering a growing number of targeted car bombings, grenade attacks and killings of family members, the London-based organisation said in a report entitled “Their lives on the line”.

Most of the threats come from the Taliban and armed opposition groups, but government officials and local warlords also commit abuses against female activists, the report said.

“The lack of protection is simply shocking,”Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary general, told reporters. He said that out of the 50 cases Amnesty examined, in only one instance was an arrest made. In all the other cases, complaints were neglected or ignored by officials.

“It’s outrageous that Afghan authorities are leaving them to fend for themselves, with their situation more dangerous than ever,” he said.

The brutal murder of Farkhunda, a young woman in Afghanistan, whose body was burnt and callously chucked into a river in Kabul, shocked the world.

Accused of burning pages from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, many protested the 27-year-old’s innocence.

Her killing has been widely condemned, and many activists believe it could become the pivot on which Afghanistan’s culture of impunity for abuse of women turns.

While Shetty said that many attacks on womenhuman rights activists were by religious extremists like the Taliban and other conservative forces, government officials, local commanders and even male colleagues of women had also been involved in violence against them.

Afghanistan has regularly been named as one of the worst places in the world to be born female.

Amnesty’s report also urged the Afghan government to ensure that all allegations of threats or attacks against women rights activists are fully and impartially investigated and perpetrators held to account.
Reported by Wahid Nawesa