The decision was taken after the Taliban announced a ban on women from working in humanitarian organizations and from studying.
The United Nations announced on Wednesday that it was temporarily suspending “time-critical” programs in Afghanistan and warned that several more of its activities in the Southeast Asian country would have to be halted until further notice because of the Taliban’s ban on women working in aid organizations.
Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, the heads of various UN agencies and non-governmental aid organizations stressed in a joint statement that “women’s participation” in humanitarian aid operations is “non-negotiable” and a necessity “to continue,” calling on the de facto government to lift their ban.
“The ban on women’s participation in humanitarian work has immediate and deadly consequences for all Afghans. Already, some time-critical programs have had to be temporarily suspended due to the lack of female staff,” said the text, which was released by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“We cannot ignore the operational constraints we face as a humanitarian community,” the statement continued. “We will try to continue our life-saving activities”, but “we foresee that many (activities still) will have to be suspended, because we cannot provide (…) humanitarian aid if we do not have women workers”.
The ban was announced by the fundamentalist Sunni regime on Saturday. It followed last week’s ban on women studying at universities. The Taliban already banned girls from attending secondary schools in March.
“No country can exclude half of its population from contributing to society”, underlines the statement, signed by the heads of UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Program and the UN Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights.
At the same time, 12 countries and the EU called on the Taliban in a joint statement to lift the ban on women working in humanitarian organizations and to allow women and girls to return to universities and schools. This announcement is signed by the Foreign Ministers of Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, the USA and the EU.
Banning women from working “endangers millions of Afghans who depend on humanitarian aid to survive,” it said.
The UN statement emphasized that the ban was imposed at a time “when more than 28 million people in Afghanistan” need “help to survive” as the country “risks experiencing conditions conducive to famine” and faces “economic withering”, the ” poverty’ of most of the population and the ‘hard winter’.
RES-EMP
Read the News today and get the latest news.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
