The United Nations headquarters in New York on Monday amplified the voices that Afghan women cannot use in their country because of the restrictions they face, during a side event at the General Assembly where American actress Meryl Streep lamented that in the Asian country even “a squirrel” enjoys more rights than a woman.
Streep warned that the way Afghan “culture” and “society” have been disrupted should serve as a “warning to the rest of the world.” “In the 1970s [en Afganistán]”The majority of civil servants were women; more than half of teachers and doctors were women, there were women lawyers, women attorneys, there were women in all professions. And then the world collapsed,” the interpreter said.
“Today in Kabul, a cat has more freedoms than a woman. “A cat can sit outside and feel the sun on its face, it can chase a squirrel in the park,” Streep continued. “Today, a squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan, because public parks have been closed to women and girls. A bird can sing in Kabul, but not a girl. This is unusual, it is a suppression of natural rights,” the actress denounced before the UN.
Afghan authorities against women’s voices
Last August, Afghanistan passed a law for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice that requires women to wear veils to cover their faces and bodies to avoid “provoking temptation” and condemned the sound of women’s voices in public, including singing, reciting or speaking into microphones, as an offence against modesty, applying the strictest interpretation of Islamic law.
“The new law passed last month formalizes the systematic removal of women and girls from public life. Afghan women and girls are largely confined to their homes, with no freedom of movement and almost no access to education or work. They are even forbidden from singing or raising their voices in public,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
It was at a side event titled “Women’s Inclusion in Afghanistan’s Future” that Streep spoke out about the plight of women in the country. “In 1971, I graduated from college here in New York, and that was the year Swiss women got the right to vote. “In Afghanistan, of course, women have had that right for half a century,” the actress noted.
