The radical Islamists of the Taliban in the UN Women's Rights Commission?
This grotesque constellation could soon become a reality, warns an expert.
New York / Kabul - The situation at the airport in Kabul is still dire - and fear of the Taliban is likely to become bitter everyday life in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the international community is already faced with practical questions in dealing with the new rulers.
For example: Can the Islamist government be recognized?
If the United Nations does that, according to an expert, a grotesque situation could arise in several UN bodies.
For example, the Taliban could get seats in the UN Women's Rights Commission and in the World Heritage Organization UNESCO.
Hillel Neuer, Canadian lawyer and founding chairman of the NGO “Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy”, pointed this out in a tweet on Friday.
This perspective is "tragic", he said.
Afghanistan: Taliban could move into UN women's rights commission - and get into UNESCO seat
According to Neuer, the Taliban could "inherit" the Afghan government's posts in the two bodies.
Afghanistan was elected to the women's rights commission in 2021.
"That would mean that terrorists who whip women and girls for going to work or school, sit at the top of the most important women's rights body in the world," said the expert.
In fact, there are already reports of rights violations against women in Afghanistan.
Tragic: 🇦🇫 Afghanistan just took its seat on the UN women's rights commission and if the new Taliban regime gets recognized it means the terrorists who lash women and girls for going to work and school will be sitting on the world's top women's rights body.
https://t.co/koKTeVATFi
- Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 19, 2021
Neuer also warned against the influence of the Taliban in UNESCO. "Unfortunately, the Taliban's expertise lies in disrupting the world's cultural and natural heritage," he wrote sarcastically in another tweet. The lawyer was alluding to, among other things, the destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001, a crime before NATO intervened in Afghanistan.
Most recently, German archaeologists had drawn attention to the mortal danger of their colleagues in Afghanistan in an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU).
"Colleagues who are still in Afghanistan must - after everything that has now happened in terms of impossibilities on the part of the German government as far as aid is concerned - be removed from the country immediately and unbureaucratically," said the Berlin archeology professor Reinhard Bernbeck to Deutschlandfunk.
He also referred explicitly to "those who, for example, have worked with the German archaeological institute or with other German institutions."
Afghanistan: will the UN recognize the Taliban as a government?
Guterres sees "only lever"
The fact that the Taliban will be recognized by the United Nations as the official government of Afghanistan does not seem to be ruled out.
UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres said on Thursday after a meeting of the Security Council that the Taliban's striving for international recognition was the “only lever” to push for rights to be observed - also with a view to women's rights.
He called for a "united stance" on the part of the United Nations towards the Islamists.
The UN chief is aware that women and girls, among others, are in danger in Afghanistan.
He had "received harrowing reports of serious human rights restrictions across the country," Guterres said on Tuesday.
"I am particularly concerned about reports of growing human rights violations against women and girls in Afghanistan."
The Women's Rights Commission meets once a year for two weeks in New York. 45 countries are members - Germany has also been part of the group again since 2020. However, membership is not necessarily to be understood as a nobility strike in dealing with women's rights. Somalia - where genital mutilation is the order of the day - and Turkey, which recently left the Istanbul Convention on Women's Rights, are also represented. (
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