UN Mission Calls on Taliban To Reopen High Schools to Girls on 1st Anniversary of Closure

On the first anniversary of the day that the Taliban closed high schools to girls, the United Nations called on the Taliban to allow them to return to the classroom. “This is a tragic, shameful, and entirely avoidable anniversary,” Markus Potzel, the acting head of UNAMA, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement issued on Sunday. “The ongoing exclusion of girls from high school has no credible justification and has no parallel anywhere in the world. It is profoundly damaging to a generation of girls and to the future of Afghanistan itself.” It is estimated that more than one million girls ages 12-18 have been barred from attending high school over the past year. The statement said that the “denial of education violates the most fundamental rights of girls and women. It increases the risk of the marginalization, violence, exploitation and abuse against girls and is part of a broader range of discriminatory policies and practices targeting women and girls since the de facto authorities assumed power in the summer of 2021.” The United Nations called on the Taliban “to reverse the slew of measures they have introduced restricting Afghan women and girls’ enjoyment of their basic rights and freedoms.” The Taliban also have banned women from government jobs and ordered them to be covered up in public, preferably with a burqa.