The Taliban's new 'terrifying' laws

The Morning Edition

Women in Afghanistan have had their freedoms crushed by the Taliban, which has enacted rules that chip away at their basic human rights.

They’ve long been banned from studying, working, going to a salon or a gym.

But over the last few months, the regime has cracked down even further, by implementing a raft of new “vice and virtue” laws.

Women are now forbidden from speaking or even praying in public. They’re also not allowed to show their bare faces in public, or to be heard singing or reading aloud. Even from inside their own homes.

Today, Australian National University scholar Susan Hutchinson, and human rights lawyer Azadah Raz Mohammad, on what these new laws have made life like for women in Afghanistan. And the global push by countries, including Australia, to hold the Taliban to account.

Read/watch/listen

• 'If we can't speak, why live?' - BBC meets women after new Taliban law.
• Malala: what’s happening to Afghan girls and women is ‘gender apartheid’, MSNBC.

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