Meeting the Taliban’s minister for Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, in Kabul on Sunday, the UN’s Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan, Markus Potzel, said that the Afghan rulers’ bans against women “prevent life-saving help reaching Afghans and will hit Afghanistan economy.”
The UN envoy pleaded with Hanafi to lift the recently imposed bans on women’s rights to education and work.
Yesterday, Potzel met with the Taliban education minister, Mullah Neda Mohammad Nadim, who has defended the ban on women from universities as “necessary to prevent the mixing of genders” and warned that Afghanistan was “entering a new period of crisis.