Media Coverage

The Taliban have barred United Nations-appointed special rapporteur Richard Bennett from entering Afghanistan, accusing the human rights watchdog of “"spreading propaganda.” Bennett was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2022 to monitor Afghanistan's human rights situation after...

The 300-plus reported cases of Afghan women being killed by men since the Taliban seized power are just “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the true scale of gender-based violence in Afghanistan, according to new data analysis. Open-source investigators at the Centre of Information Resilience...

International envoys raised concerns about restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan during meetings with the country's ruling Taliban in Qatar, United Nations' political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo said on July 1. The two-day, UN-led meeting was the first of its kind attended by the Taliban...

The United Nations' top official in Afghanistan defended the failure to include Afghan women in the upcoming first meeting between the Taliban and envoys from 22 countries, insisting that demands for women’s rights are certain to be raised. U.N. special envoy Roza Otunbayeva was pummeled with...

Afghan and international media watchdogs have condemned Afghanistan's hardline Islamist Taliban rulers for handing down a one-year sentence to journalist Sultan Ali Jawadi on unspecified charges and called for his immediate release, along with the freeing of another recently detained media member...

Taliban officials are sending Afghan women to prison to protect them from gender-based violence, according to a UN report published Thursday. Before the Taliban seized power in 2021, there were 23 state-sponsored women protection centers in Afghanistan where survivors of gender-based violence could...

The Taliban’s “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls in Afghanistan, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Wednesday. The Taliban have been globally condemned for banning girls and women from secondary school and university, but the rights group says there has...

Online abuse and hate speech targeting politically active women in Afghanistan has significantly increased since the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, according to a report released Monday by a U.K.-based rights group. Afghan Witness—an open-source project run by the nonprofit Center for...

United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said he is “alarmed” by reports that Afghan refugees are being abused in Pakistan as the country carries out its policy of forced mass deportation. In a statement Wednesday, Türk expressed concern at reports that “the arbitrary expulsion of Afghan...

David McBride—a former army lawyer who revealed information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan—could be facing a “life sentence” if found guilty in a trial that started on Monday. While Australia has established an independent special investigator into alleged war crimes committed by...