The silencing of Afghanistan’s women is now complete.

This week, Afghanistan’s Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice came into force.

Women’s voices are now considered as awrah, or intimate parts, and may only be experienced in cases of necessity. Women must refrain from raising their voices and they are forbidden from being overheard reading aloud, chanting or singing outside their homes.

The law also dictates that women’s bodies and faces must be fully covered.

“It is haram for unrelated men to look at the bodies or faces of unrelated women, and it is haram for unrelated women to look at unrelated men,” the law says.

It is the Taliban’s ultimate denial of women’s freedom of expression and is an all too predictable outcome of the withdrawal of Western troops from the country in 2021.

The law, ratified by Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, applies to all individuals living in Afghanistan including foreign residents.

Punishment for these “crimes” will be carried out by the Taliban’s Muhtaseebs or morality police who have the authority to detain individuals for up to three days on the flimsiest of evidence.

These “vice and virtue” laws also severely restrict religious practices, outline what individuals can and cannot do in their sex lives and allow the Taliban to regulate both state and private media outlets. Publishing images of living beings is now also forbidden and people are now forbidden from storing photos or videos of others on their phones.

The human rights community has been quick to denounce the new laws.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Ravina Shamdasani said the new policies were contrary to international human rights law and “completely erase women’s presence in public – silencing their voices, and depriving them of their individual autonomy, effectively attempting to render them into faceless, voiceless shadows”.

“Disempowering and rendering invisible and voiceless half the population of Afghanistan will only worsen the human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country. Rather, this is a time to bring together all the people of Afghanistan, irrespective of their gender, religion or ethnicity, to help resolve the many challenges the country faces.”

These new laws go against everything we stand for at Index on Censorship and show a complete failure of the West’s foreign policies. And it's the women of Afghanistan who have paid the highest price.

Mark Stimpson
Associate editor