Taliban’s shocking treatment of women shows why world must impose apartheid-style sporting boycott

Thirty years ago, the global community adopted the Beijing Declaration. Never heard of it? You’re not alone. Its text may be familiar to most women’s organisations, some civil servants, even a few politicians, but it is hardly common knowledge.

Yet the resolution signed by 189 countries – including Afghanistan – is the single most important text on women’s rights ever produced. Its 39 paragraphs describe a set of principles to advance the “goals of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere in the interest of all humanity”.

As the then First Lady Hillary Clinton said when the declaration was agreed: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women's rights – and women's rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely – and the right to be heard.”

Stirring words, which will no doubt be repeated in New York on Monday, March 10, when the world gathers to celebrate 30 years of the declaration at the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, a body dedicated to securing women’s rights, which was set up in 1946 in the optimistic aftermath of the Second World War.

The Taliban has turned Afghanistan into the worst place on Earth to be a woman (Picture: Bulent Kilic) | AFP via Getty Images

Basic human rights denied

Twenty-four hours before the delegates pour into the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan, two of the world’s best cricket teams will have just finished playing in the final of the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) Men’s Champions Trophy. Hundreds of millions people around the world will watch the game, which could potentially see the England national squad facing off against Afghanistan, the country where women and girls are denied their most basic human rights, including education.

The country where women and girls are not allowed to “speak freely” in public. The country where girls are banned from playing sport – any sport – and its national women’s cricket team was banned by the Taliban when they returned to power in August 2021. Afghanistan, the country where women and girls are treated as less than human, but its male cricketers are heroes and welcomed on the global stage.

It is one of only eight teams taking part in the ICC’s prestigious tournament. Former England cricket star, South-African born Johnathan Trott, is head coach of the Afghanistan team, and has just had his contract extended. And despite announcing earlier this year that it will not schedule any bilateral games against Afghanistan, England will play them in the first round of the Champions Trophy on February 26.

Even Hillary Clinton, hardly known for her love of Wisden, the cricket fan’s bible, warmly welcomed the Afghan cricketers’ fairytale rise from refugee camps to world tournaments. “If we are searching for a model of how to meet tough international challenges with skill, dedication and teamwork, we need only look to the Afghan national cricket team,” she said in 2010.

‘Grave concern’

But that was then. This is now. Thirty years after the Beijing Declaration, women across the world still suffer structural and cultural inequality, from the pay gap to political power. Sexual violence remains commonplace and is now glorified in online pornography.

In many countries, the birth of a girl is still greeted with disappointment. The selective abortion of female foetuses remains widespread in some parts of the world, even in countries like India where the practice has been outlawed. And in Afghanistan – the worst place on Earth to be female – the ruling regime has systemically stripped women and girls of every single human right.

Last week in Geneva, the special envoys on Afghanistan from some of the world’s leading economies, including the USA and Britain, issued a statement expressing their “grave concern” over the treatment of Afghan women and girls, and looked forward to meeting again in the near future. Perhaps next time they will take action, instead of simply publishing toothless texts.

The sporting boycott of South Africa was widely regarded as an essential part of the successful international campaign to end apartheid. The country was banned from the Olympics, the Fifa World Cup and international cricket tournaments for nearly 30 years, until 1992. Rugby and cricket were central to the national identity of South Africa’s white minority and the sporting ban did as much as economic isolation and political pressure to bring about the end of apartheid.

Taliban’s evil rules

As long as Afghanistan’s male cricket team is welcome on the world stage, the Taliban win. Women’s rights campaigners and ‘special representatives’ can issue as many strongly worded statements of condemnation as they wish, they will be simply be brushed aside by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and his Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Ministry, the morality police which enforce the Taliban’s evil rules, as they cheer on their national team.

There is no political or moral justification for allowing the country to take part in any sporting tournament. Rashid Khan, captain of the Afghanistan men’s national cricket, team may have posted on social media recently that women had a “right” to education and must be allowed to train as doctors and nurses. Yet only a few weeks ago, pictures of his wedding featured on social media were of men only. Not even his bride was allowed to show her face.

When the Commission on the Status of Women meets in March, in the wake of the ICC’s Champions Trophy, the delegates must call for a sporting boycott of Afghanistan. The right of Afghan women to speak freely, to be heard and to be seen, far outstrips the right of any country to play cricket in an international tournament.