The United Nations’ recent capitulation to the Taliban at the Third Doha Meeting on Afghanistan was a painful reminder that equality for women is still very much in its infancy in large parts of the world. Instead of standing up to gender apartheid, the UN’s cowardice is enabling it, showing that their moral failings are far beyond their irrational obsession with the Jewish state.
In all three Doha meetings on Afghanistan, which have been convened by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, 48.3% of Afghanistan's population have been excluded in one way or another because the meeting's topics do not involve women. In the first meeting in May 2023, women were not invited. In the second meeting in February 2024, women were excluded from the main sessions and that was insufficient for the Taliban, which still refused to meet with (male) UN officials. In the third meeting, women were once again excluded from the event altogether after the UN agreed to appease the Taliban’s demands.
Guterres previously stated: “We will never be silent in the face of unprecedented, systemic attacks on womens’ and girls’ rights,” yet that is exactly what the UN is doing, and has been doing. Instead of standing strongly against policies of gender apartheid, they’re trying to appease the oppressors.
The United Nations is at war against women, despite its statements claiming the polar opposite, because inaction is complicity. It is time for the UN to take decisive action against gender apartheid regimes and organizations, revealing concrete steps to remove them from positions of power in the United Nations.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was elected to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) for the 2022-26 term. It served in this role until being removed in December 2023, following the murder of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini by the regime’s morality police for improperly wearing a hijab. But only after hundreds of thousands of protesters inside and outside of the country demanded action did the UN even pay attention. Since then, the UN has selected the Islamic Republic to chair other official UN meetings, including the UN’s conference on disarmament.
For 45 years, the Islamic Republic has used sexual violence as a weapon of war, restricted women from basic activities like attending school, smoking and attending sports events, and brutally oppressed them. Recent atrocities include gassing schoolgirls, intentionally shooting women and girls in sensitive areas, and imprisoning and torturing those who defy the mandatory hijab. Morality police are frequently seen on social media beating and dragging girls as young as 16 into unmarked vans for hijab violations. The regime has intensified its crackdown with the Noor initiative, imposing harsher penalties for rejecting the hijab and using facial recognition to seize money from women's bank accounts.
It is impossible to leave out the fact that, for two months, UN Women failed to even comment on the widespread use of sexual violence against Israeli women in the October 7 massacre by a terror proxy of the Islamic Republic, Hamas. This was despite the fact that Hamas filmed themselves committing some of these acts, and videos were shared, by them, of them kidnapping young girls with bloodied pants bottoms and even referring to their victims as sex slaves. While the UN and UN Women have previously been quick to comment on every other anti-female event taking place in the region, suddenly, when Israeli women were the victims, there was silence.
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Afghan woman in Pakistan protests against the Taliban's rule
(Photo: Aamir Qureshi / AFP)
You cannot claim to be protecting women’s rights while propping up their abusers and ignoring their gender apartheid crimes. You cannot claim to be advocating for the advancement and equality of women, while simultaneously compromising on the most basic of rights – having a say in the discussion about our own fate. The exclusion of women from the conversation at the Doha Meetings on Afghanistan are inexcusable and there is a desperate need for a reckoning within the UN on women’s rights.
The rights of Afghan women, Iranian women, Israeli women and all women are too important to be politicized the way the UN has allowed them to be in recent years. There must be consequences for systemic oppression of women. If not, what is the purpose of a body that purports to advance human rights for all?