Afghanistan

There is a long way to go before the rights of Afghan women are fully protected, says a United Nations report released today, noting that the Government has not yet succeeded in applying a two-year-old landmark law to the vast majority of cases of violence against women.

On October 31, 2000, the UN Security Council (UNSC) unanimously passed resolution 1325. The resolution marked the first time that the body recognized the unique impact of armed conflict on women—and women's undervalued role in peacebuilding. As Sanam-Naraghi Anderlini, who was a civil society drafter of the resolution, described, the resolution was spurred by the wars of the 1990s.

Afghan women activists are at risk of being sidelined at a key international conference on Afghanistan's future scheduled for December 5, 2011, in Germany, Human Rights Watch said today.

Eleven years since its adoption, once again, the international community will be debating progress towards implementing a UN commitment to ensure that women are included in peace deals.

Before US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left the podium at the International Conference on Afghanistan in London on 28 January 2010, she pointed to four women wrapped in green scarves and clustered together in the corner of the crowded press conference room and asked them to stand up.

In its statement to the world, the Norwegian Nobel Committee honored women warriors battling for peace and said it hoped the Peace Prize would help to ”realise the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.” Now comes a test of the world's resolve to achieve that potential. Afghanistan.

Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan women emerged as a high-profile focus of U.S. policy. Women's progress was promoted as a powerful, positive product of the international presence in the war-scarred country. But ten years later, with negotiation and reconciliation widely viewed as the only options for ending the war, Afghan women's rights seems largely forgotten.

The 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan falls in the first week of October, but it will attract a fraction of the attention afforded last month's events marking a decade since 9/11. Only a few stalwart protests in the UK and the US planned for Saturday will try to get an inattentive public to engage with what is now America's longest war.

Stakes are high for Afghanistan's women, who fear their rights could slip away in a quick-fix bargain for peace, according to aid agency Oxfam. There is a risk that the Kabul government may sacrifice women's rights in its efforts to broker a peace deal with the Taliban, Oxfam says. The two sides are in talks to reach a political settlement to the Afghan war before U.S. and NATO troops withdraw in 2014.

Women's rights in Afghanistan are once again under threat after 10 years of progress, two leading British aid agencies have said. Oxfam and Action Aid said on Monday many Afghan women were worried that the impending international troop withdrawal, coupled with an on-going effort to secure a political deal with the Taliban, could undermine their future.