More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.
Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees.
The summit, which has been two years in the making, is being hosted by the Albanian government in Tirana after multiple other governments across the region refused, said the organisers.
Fawzia Koofi, the women’s activist and former Afghan MP, whose organisation Women for Afghanistan arranged the summit, said: “In these three days, the women of Afghanistan from all backgrounds come together to unite their efforts on scenarios to change the current status quo at a time when women in Afghanistan say they are being completely erased from the public sphere.
“We aim to achieve consensus and strategise on how to make the Taliban accountable for the human rights violations they are perpetrating and how to improve the economic situation for women inside the country.”
The summit comes a few weeks after the Taliban published new “vice and virtue” laws that banned women’s voices being heard in public and made it mandatory for women to completely cover their bodies outside the home.
“Us being here together is an act of defiance. We will not be silenced,” said Seema Ghani, a former minister under the government of Hamid Karzai and now a women’s rights activist who has remained in Afghanistan to carry out humanitarian work. “Women and girls inside Afghanistan are living lives that are dominated by fear, every day. Just leaving the house is an ordeal.”
“The world is moving on but we are here, all of us together, to try to make sure that we are not forgotten. We are not all here to agree with each other, but we are here to talk, debate and hopefully end with a united voice,” said Ghani.
At the end of the three-day summit, the organisers hope to publish a set of demands or guidelines for the international community that sets out how Afghan women want to respond to the systematic attack on their rights and freedom by the Taliban.
In the three years since the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, women have been barred from most forms of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks and shut out of the criminal justice system, and girls have been stopped from going to secondary school or university. The Taliban have also resumed the stoning of women for crimes such as adultery.
A campaign for the Taliban’s treatment of women to be recognised as “gender apartheid” and a crime against humanity under international law was launched last year in an attempt to hold the group to account.
