In recent years, several countries—including Croatia, Malta, and others—have recognized femicide as a distinct crime. The Italian government and parliament also took this step, acknowledging that killing a woman solely because of her gender is not just homicide, but a crime rooted in gender-based violence. These legislative shifts are historic because they name what was [...]
It was a late September afternoon when I spotted a pair of beautiful earrings on Instagram. Curious, I followed the account’s links to an online shop. Alongside the other items, they offered curated gift packages. When I messaged them, I learned the owner was a young woman. The shop owner, Diana (a pseudonym), responded with [...]
“Left out here and driven away from there” — this old Dari proverb describes a person who has been rejected from both sides, meaning they can neither stay in the first place nor be accepted in the second. For 20-year-old Yasna, a young Afghan woman, and hundreds of thousands of other Afghan people who fled [...]
Is this the last time you’ll hear from me? It could be, as the Taliban’s crackdown on all of our rights has extended to internet technology. A ban on fiber optic internet has begun its slow trickle from province to province, and it could be only a matter of time before the whole country is [...]
The earth shook beneath Afghanistan once again, and as rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble, one devastating truth became clear: half our population remains invisible even in our darkest hour. As aftershocks continue to rattle the earthquake-stricken regions, the images and videos emerging from the disaster zone tell a familiar, heartbreaking story. Men dig [...]
Once upon a time in America, there was a political movement that saw the adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow as misguided at best, nefarious at worst. It asserted that the United States government only pursued such an antagonism as a way of feeding the military industrial complex that enriched its elites and the politicians [...]
As the global community marked International Human Rights Day earlier this month, millions of Afghan women and girls remained trapped in their homes, cast out of their schools, work and public life by repressive Taliban policy. Last year, in response to these then-already-ongoing human rights violations, the US government announced new sanctions against Taliban officials [...]
More than three years since the military takeover by Taliban in 2021, Afghanistan remains engulfed in a severe human rights crisis. Extrajudicial killings, public executions, flogging in stadiums, and other forms of corporal punishment, arbitrary detentions, torture and disappearances of former government officials, members of the national security forces, judges, lawyers, human rights defenders, journalists, [...]
Recent headlines brought a glimmer of hope to the women and girls whose lives under the Taliban have essentially been reduced to prison terms: Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands announced plans to bring the Taliban to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for gender discrimination. As an Afghan woman, I have been horrified to [...]
As the Taliban continues its ever-expanding efforts to keep women and girls out of the public eye, one Afghan woman is leveraging her business acumen to challenge the new status quo. In late August, the Taliban issued a new law restricting women’s voices and faces in public spaces, the latest steps in their ongoing campaign [...]
