Squirrels have 'more rights' than Afghan girls - Streep

Meryl Streep is one of Hollywood's greatest actors - but at the United Nations she is lending her voice to Afghanistan's women - denied the right to speak out publicly, or do much else by the Taliban.

The ultra-conservative Muslim regime has, in the words of a UN report last month, spent the past three years "erasing women from the public life of Afghanistan".

At an event in UN headquarters, co-hosted by Ireland, Ms Streep spoke out against the Taliban's repression of women.

"Today in Kabul, a female cat has more freedom than a woman," she said.

"A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park. A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban. A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not, and a woman may not in public.

"This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of the natural law. This is odd," she told an audience of politicians and diplomats.

Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin pledged continuing Irish Government support for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.

He said that what the Taliban is doing is "a persecution of a gender, which I think is perhaps without precedent ever in the history of the world".

And he has criticised much of the rest of the world for shrugging their shoulders at what is going on in Afghanistan.

"The passivity of the international community is quite striking, given the enormity of what actually is taking place here," he said.

The event was also co-hosted by the governments of Indonesia, Qatar and Switzerland, which gave Ms Streep pause for reflection on what has happened over her lifetime to the position of Afghan women.

"In 1971 I graduated from college here in New York, and that year, women in Switzerland were granted the right to vote," she said.

"Women in Afghanistan, of course, had enjoyed that right already for half a century. Women in Afghanistan received the vote in 1919, 20 years before the women in France and well before women in the United States received the right to vote.

"The way that this culture, this society, has been upended, is a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. In the 70s, most of the civil servants were women. Over half the teachers and doctors there were women, jurists, lawyers, in every profession. And then the world upended."

The Secretary General of the United Nations spelled out some of the dreadful conditions Afghan women now face.

"Afghan women and girls are largely confined to their homes with no freedom of movement and almost no access to education or work," António Guterres said.

"They're even banned from singing or raising their voice in public. The law is the latest in a series of edicts and decrees that strip Afghan women and girls of their rights and freedoms across the board.

"At the same time, Afghan women suffer high rates of gender based violence, so called honour killings, and rising maternal mortality.

"They have told the United Nations that they feel unsafe, isolated and powerless, as they lose the ability to provide for their families, or contribute to their communities."

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The Tánaiste said that as a former teacher he found the denial of education to Afghan women particularly hard to take.

"It really offends me as a person. As a teacher, I had a passion for education," he said.

"I cannot get over this most fundamental denial of a very basic yearning in every human being, to learn and to be curious from the day you were born. And to me, it's something I can't come to grips with."

He pledged continuing support from the Irish Government for the campaign to restore rights to Afghan women.

"We can't allow Afghanistan to come off the agenda, and we will work with you and the international community to do everything we can to keep this issue on the world agenda, but also to start looking in a more strategic way as how we can affect change, change as urgently required for young girls born today in Afghanistan," Mr Martin said.

The meeting was also shown an extract from a documentary - 'The Sharp Edge of Peace' - about the four Afghan women who took part in the negotiations that led to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban government.

They were the only women the Taliban ever met across a negotiating table.

One of them, Fawzia Koofi, also spoke at the event, saying: "Its heartrending for all of us to think (back) about things that we had taken it for granted for 20 years.

"We never thought we would go back and speak about our fundamental Islamic and human rights, the rights to education, to work, to coexistence."

For Meryl Streep, the international community - especially those of the Sunni faith, the majority religion in Afghanistan - has a responsibility to intervene on behalf of Afghan women and girls.

"I feel that the Taliban - since they've issued over 100 edicts in Afghanistan stripping women and girls of their education and employment, their freedom of expression and movement - have effectively incarcerated half their own population," she said.