The American actor Meryl Streep has said that “a squirrel has more rights” than an Afghan girl under the current Taliban regime.
Streep, who attended an event on the situation facing women and girls in Afghanistan as part of the UN general assembly in New York, called the Taliban’s draconian restrictions on women’s lives a form of “suffocation”.
“A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban,” Streep said on Monday. “A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not, and a woman may not in public.”
In the three years since the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, women have seen their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away. They have been barred from most forms of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks and girls have been stopped from going to secondary school or university.
Last month, the Taliban published a new set of “vice and virtue” laws that said women must not leave the house without being fully covered and could not sing or raise their voices in public.
Streep spoke alongside Afghan activists and human rights defenders, who called on the UN to act to protect and restore the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.
Asila Wardak, a leader of the Women’s Forum on Afghanistan, said that the system of what has been described as “gender apartheid” being imposed on women and girls in Afghanistan, was not just an Afghan issue, but part of the “global fight against extremism”.
Streep’s comments have been widely shared on social media by human rights activists, who praised the actor for using her fame and platform to amplify the voices of Afghan women.
A campaign for the Taliban’s treatment of women to be recognised as gender apartheid and a crime against humanity was launched last year in an attempt to hold the group to account.
Activists hope that codifying gender apartheid in Afghanistan under international law will be discussed and agreed at the UN general assembly over the coming weeks.