Islamabad: The Taliban’s new vice and virtue laws that include a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public provide a “distressing vision” for Afghanistan’s future, a top UN official warned on Sunday.
Roza Otunbayeva, who heads the UN mission in the country, said the laws extend the “already intolerable restrictions” on the rights of women and girls, with “even the sound of a female voice” outside the home apparently deemed a moral violation.
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers last Wednesday issued the country’s first set of laws to prevent vice and promote virtue. They include a requirement for a woman to conceal her face, body and voice outside the home. The laws empower the ministry to be at the front line of regulating personal conduct and administering punishments like warnings
or arrest.