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Violence against Afghan women carried out with impunity: UN
KABUL, May 29, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The United Nations issued a blistering
report Tuesday accusing the Afghan state of violating women’s rights by
failing to prosecute criminal violence against them, underscoring widespread
gender brutality nearly 17 years after the Taliban’s fall.
A law protecting women from violence has been in place since 2009, but
instead of enforcing it authorities are allowing and sometimes overseeing
informal mediation to resolve criminal cases, the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in the report.
In a country where women are often confined to the home and seen as
subordinate to men, access to justice remains “severely inadequate” and
promotes impunity for perpetrators, UNAMA added.
The report — titled “Injustice and Impunity” — documents the experiences
of women who survived violence and tried to bring criminal complaints against
their male attackers in 237 cases across Afghanistan from August 2015 until
December 2017.
Of them, 145 were resolved by mediation, the report said, adding that it
documented a “consistent pattern” of women being pressured by authorities as
well as their families to withdraw their complaints.
The report also examined 280 cases of murder, including many carried out in
the name of so-called “honour”, in which women are killed — often by male
relatives — for bringing what is described as “shame” on the family under an
outdated, patriarchal social code.
Only 50 of them — or 18 percent — resulted in the perpetrators being
punished under the law.
The landmark 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law
criminalises child marriage, forced marriage, forced self-immolation, rape
and other violence against women.
There is no provision in Afghan law that allows for mediation in such
criminal cases.
Pressuring a woman to accept mediation therefore “amounted to a direct
breach of the EVAW Law, the Penal Code, and constituted a human rights
violation on the part of the State,” the report said.
“Once mediated, incidents of violence against women are essentially
transformed from ‘criminal acts’ into mere ‘family disputes’,” Danielle Bell,
UNAMA’s human rights chief, told AFP.
Women “are encouraged to reconcile with the perpetrator as if no actual
crime occurred, or to seek a divorce if the parties cannot reach an
agreement. Such outcomes directly contradict the spirit and letter of the
EVAW Law.”
It also means that once a complaint is made, the risk of seeing the
violence repeated is “quite high”, Bell said.
The Afghan government had made “concrete” efforts, however, and agreed that
“there is no room for forced mediation and informal justice in criminal
offences”, according to the report.
But it said the frequent failures to investigate and prosecute such crimes
contributed to “the existing high rate of impunity and strengthened the
normalisation of violence against women in the Afghan society”.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1518 hrs