GENEVA (The Thursday Times) — Pakistan has told the UN Human Rights Council that the Afghan Taliban continue to let terrorist groups operate from Afghan soil, saying more than 4,700 Pakistanis have been killed in terrorist attacks originating from Afghanistan over the past three years.
Addressing the council’s interactive dialogue on Afghanistan on Thursday, Pakistan’s representative Muhammad Jawad Ajmal accused the Taliban regime of maintaining close links with terrorist organisations that operate with impunity in Afghanistan, backed by external actors targeting Pakistan and other neighbours. The Taliban’s failure to publicly denounce these groups showed “complicity and active support”, he said.
Ajmal said the deteriorating human rights situation reflected the Taliban’s disregard for their international obligations, with women and girls denied fundamental freedoms through practices that violated Islamic law and the tenets of the faith. He cited the Islamabad Declaration, adopted by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at a ministerial conference on women hosted by Pakistan in July, which said Taliban restrictions on women were inconsistent with Islamic values.
Separately, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett told the General Assembly that five years after seizing power, the Taliban had shown no willingness to reverse systematic abuses and had instead deepened restrictions on women and girls. He urged member states not to normalise relations with the regime without verifiable improvements, citing recent decrees that enabled violence against women, made it nearly impossible for them to leave abusive marriages and permitted child marriage.
Bennett’s report documented arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. The statements come as Pakistani forces this week destroyed Afghan Taliban posts along the border after cross-border firing on Angoor Adda, and as Islamabad presses Kabul to act against the terrorist groups sheltering in Afghanistan.
