Afghanistan: Protection and Women’s Safety

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

Again, huge progress has been made here compared with only a decade ago. Of more than 6 million children in school in Afghanistan today, 2 million are girls, and many more are now attending higher education institutions. However, in a year when we are approaching the drawdown, at the end of 2014, it is important that the gains that have been made are not allowed to slip. That is why our DfID programme will continue at the level it is now.

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, it is the women human rights defenders in Afghanistan who are at particular risk. Can the Minister assure us that their safety will not be forgotten when we are discussing security in Afghanistan?

[Baroness Warsi]

They are incredibly brave women, and I also pay tribute to the incredibly brave work that my noble friend does in relation to the protection of women’s rights in Afghanistan. As a Government, we support, for example, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. It has a phenomenal chairman, Sima Samar, who puts her life at risk in raising very challenging issues. I assure my noble friend that we will continue to do all we can to make sure that this issue does not fall off the agenda as we draw down our troops.

Afghanistan: Women’s Rights

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that improvements in the rights of women in Afghanistan will endure after British troops withdraw in 2014.

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interests. I am chair of the Advisory Board of GAPS, which runs the No Women No Peace campaign focusing on Afghanistan. I am a founder member of the Afghan Women’s Support Forum and a patron of Afghan Connection. “A woman’s place is in the house or the grave” was a mantra of the brutal Taliban years. Girls were unable to go to school or to work and, as one woman told me, “When the Taliban was here, I did not have a right to go out and speak to other people. I had to wear a burka and look down”.

When the West invaded in 2001, Laura Bush declared:

“The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”.

Now, 12 years on, even though Afghanistan remains the most difficult country in the world to be a woman, there have been significant improvements. About 2.7 million women in Afghanistan are employed; 27% of MPs are women; and women hold one-quarter of government jobs. About 3 million girls are in school. There is strong evidence of a rising age for first marriages and of improved access to healthcare, while 30% of teachers are women. There are women lawyers, diplomats, pilots and soldiers, and 128 women judges. Women now have equal rights to men under the Afghan constitution. Afghanistan has signed up to CEDAW and UN Resolution 1325, and an EVAW law was brought in by presidential decree.

As Justine Greening has said:

“There has been a huge improvement”—

but—

“it was from such a low base that even now … there is a hugely long way to go”.

Progress is fragile and change in Afghanistan has been slow. Many girls drop out of education, prevented by their families from going to secondary school. Many women in rural areas still do not have maternity care due to lack of money and distance from health facilities, and many suffer from untreated depression. Maternal mortality remains high, with one in every 50 women dying of pregnancy-related causes, and only 20% of women have access to modern contraception. It is estimated that there are 2.5 million widows, mostly young and illiterate, in a country where a woman depends on her husband. Politically, not all the women MPs support women’s rights. The underfunded Ministry of Women’s Affairs is ineffectual and the nine women on the 70-member High Peace Council are mostly ignored.

There have been many reports of women in the police being assaulted by their male commanders. The handful of women’s refuges were denounced as brothels and there was push-back on the EVAW law when it was taken to Parliament this summer. As Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch said:

“It is time for donors to wake up and realise that if there is not constant pressure on the Afghan Government to respect women’s rights, there will be no women’s rights”.

The Afghan women I have met are enormously courageous. However, there is fear about what will happen after the troops leave—fear that their rights may be traded for peace with the Taliban or that they will simply be forgotten; fear about the Taliban returning; and fear of the Northern Alliance warlords and local militias, including the police. All those women human rights defenders who have raised their heads above the social parapet are at particular risk.

Nearly 40 years of war in Afghanistan have developed a culture hostile to women in public and where violence is endemic. Women on the streets are sworn at. As Horia Mosadiq of Amnesty says:

“Besides the Taliban, women suffer abuse at the hands of their own husbands, fathers, brothers and cousins—simply because the men know they can get away with it”.

An Oxfam report states:

“Official figures are distorted by underreporting but in reality as many as 87 per cent of Afghan women suffer … violence”.

Social norms prevent most women from approaching male police officers, and only a few of the police are female. Thus has been built a culture of impunity, with very few cases making it to the formal justice system and most being decided by jirgas and shuras, dominated by strongmen, while women are still prosecuted for the “crime” of running away from an abusive family.

The violence is getting worse. The 2013 UNAMA report found a 20% increase in the number of Afghan women or girls killed or injured, a trend echoed by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the International Crisis Group. In the home, tensions have increased as girls who have learnt their rights start to push against Afghan societal norms such as forced marriage.

In the past year there has been a spate of attacks on high-profile women, including two parliamentarians. Two senior policewomen in Helmand were murdered, and a well known female author who had written about the Taliban years was dragged out of her home and shot 15 times. There are many attacks on less high-profile women too—for example, Parween, a head teacher from Laghman province, was targeted for running a girls’ school, with her son abducted and killed. I heard anecdotally that police often do not even bother logging women’s deaths. Girls going to school have been attacked with acid and school drinking water has been poisoned. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has found that many honour killings and sexual assaults against women have been committed by the police themselves. Just last week, there were rumours that the amended penal code might include stoning to death of adulterers.

Hillary Clinton recently said:

“This is a serious turning point for all the people of Afghanistan, but in particular for the hard-fought gains women and girls have been able to enjoy”.

The UK Government have already committed to making violence against women and girls a priority in DfID’s Afghan operational plan. Justine Greening announced further funds last week to boost women’s voice in politics and to tackle violence through grassroots projects, and other funds are already in place to support female voter registration. I am sure that the Minister will tell us about these.

Even after the combat troops have left, the UK will have influence as a donor country, so what more can be done? We need to keep the achievements and move forward. We must ensure that women’s rights are not traded away and that female human rights defenders are given some kind of protection in line with the UN General Assembly resolution passed last week. Good quality education for girls must be assured. We must ensure a fair presidential election with women freely voting; include women in any peace negotiations and NATO talks in line with UN Resolution 1325, as their voices need to be heard; implement laws dealing with equality; build up a capacity of women in the security sector, making sure that they are supported and protected; help more women to access formal justice; with half the population under 15, educate boys that abusing women is wrong; ring fence aid money to grassroots projects that protect and help women, including women’s refuges; and ensure easy access for smaller organisations that cannot deal with complicated proposals. In the longer term, it is by working slowly and sensitively at grassroots level that culture change will occur, and to make that happen we need to work with men too.

I conclude with the words of our Foreign Secretary:

“No lasting peace can be achieved after conflict unless the needs of women are met—not only justice for the victims of crimes of war, but their active involvement in creating a society in which their rights are respected and their voices are heard”.