Banning women from varsities is Taliban’s step to erase them from public life: Penny Wong

On Friday, Senator Penny Wong, the Australian minister for foreign affairs, said that Australia vehemently rejects the Taliban’s decision of banning women from attending universities as yet another effort to marginalize women from public life. The nation’s future depends on women and girls having access to education. We support the Afghan ladies in this.
“We criticize the Taliban’s draconian restrictions on women and girls, including their ban on women attending universities”, she added in a tweet.
She further added that the foreign ministers of the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the UK , the United States, and the European Union, strongly condemn the Taliban’s recent decisions to bar women from attending universities, to keep girls out of secondary schools, and to impose other severe restrictions on Afghan women’s and girls’ ability to exercise their fundamental human rights.
The Taliban has consistently and systematically oppressed Afghan women and girls. The Taliban have issued a 16 decrees and edicts in the last 16 months, among them, limiting women’s mobility, removing them from places of employment, requiring head-to-toe coverings, prohibiting women from using public spaces like parks and gyms, and placing widows and women-headed households in difficult situations due to the requirement of male guardianship. These actions demonstrate the Taliban’s contempt for the fundamental liberties and rights of the Afghan people.
The creativity and dynamism of Afghan women are urgently required to address the dire and overwhelming economic and humanitarian requirements. All residents of Afghanistan, especially women and girls, must be able to completely, equally, and effectively engage in and contribute to the country’s future and development for it to be stable, economically viable, and peaceful.
To exercise their human rights by Afghanistan’s commitments under international law, we support all Afghans. The Taliban are increasingly alienating the Afghan people and the global world with these actions. We implore the Taliban to immediately renounce the new restrictive policies about women’s and girls’ access to higher education and quickly overturn the decision to forbid girls from attending secondary school.
The way our nations interact with the Taliban will be impacted by Taliban policies intended to eliminate women from public life.