Challenges to Women and Girls’ Right to Education and Work in Afghanistan: The Role of International Community

Abstract

After the collapse of Afghanistan’s democratic government and Taliban taking control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the lives of Afghan women and girls are severely restricted. Afghanistan is at the crossroads of its political commitments made to the international community and legally binding obligations; its actual domestic laws, policies, and state practices with respect to women's right to education, and work; and its expectation from international community for an economic bailout.

Alongside the lack of effective implementation and compliance monitoring on the part of international human rights treaty regimes, perpetual economic instability and underdevelopment are the causing factors that impinges upon the substantial application and indiscriminate realisation of Afghan women's rights. From the perspective of law of physics which suggests that ‘a number of people can do what none is able to do’ this research paper will analyse what role the international community (in general), and Muslim world through the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and European Union’s economic engagements with Afghanistan in specific, can play at the face of the fact that more than half of the economic life of Afghanistan is based on foreign aid and within this half, thirty percent is contributed by European Union.