KABUL: An Afghan girl sings in a video exhibiting only a sliver of her face, one in all dozens of ladies participating in a web based protest in opposition to a regulation that bans girls from elevating their voices in public.Taliban authorities final week introduced the regulation, which incorporates guidelines that girls’s faces, our bodies and voices must be “coated” outdoors the house, amongst 35 articles dictating behaviour and way of life.In response, Afghan girls inside and out of doors the nation have posted movies on social media of them singing, together with hashtags equivalent to “My voice just isn’t forbidden” and “No to Taliban”.In a single video, reportedly shot inside Afghanistan, a girl is proven singing whereas dressed head to toe in black, with a protracted veil over her face.”You’ve silenced my voice for the foreseeable future… you’ve gotten imprisoned me in my house for the crime of being a girl,” she says.Teams of ladies activists posted movies elevating their fists or tearing images of the Taliban supreme chief Hibatullah Akhundzada, who guidelines by decree from the southern metropolis of Kandahar.”A girl’s voice is the voice of justice,” an activist group chants in one other video.In one other, X consumer Taiba Sulaimani sings as she adjusts her veil in a mirror.”A girl’s voice is her id, not one thing that must be hidden,” she says. The morality regulation, generally known as the “Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice”, formalises many guidelines already in place for the reason that Taliban takeover in 2021.It says girls should not sing or recite aloud in public or let their voices carry past the partitions of their properties.”When an grownup girl has to depart her house out of necessity, she is required to cowl her face, physique and voice,” it says.The regulation refers to girls’s voices as “aurat” — a time period utilized in Islamic regulation, or sharia, to indicate the intimate elements of a person or girl that have to be coated.Ladies and men can’t have a look at members of the other intercourse who aren’t shut family and taxi drivers mustn’t transport girls travelling with out male guardians, in accordance with the regulation. When the Taliban authorities swept to energy they applied a strict interpretation of Islamic regulation.Chief Taliban authorities spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has dismissed criticism of the regulation as “vanity” and misunderstanding or disrespect of sharia. Girls have borne the brunt of restrictions launched over the previous three years which have restricted schooling in addition to entry to public areas and many roles that the United Nations has labelled “gender apartheid”.The UN and different worldwide our bodies have condemned the brand new regulation, saying it additional squeezes girls’s rights.On Tuesday, the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights referred to as for the regulation to be repealed, calling it “totally insupportable”.The regulation “cements insurance policies that fully erase girls’s presence in public — silencing their voices, and depriving them of their particular person autonomy, successfully making an attempt to render them into faceless, unvoiced shadows”, stated spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani.
