The United Nations special rapporteur for Afghanistan has called on Britain to take more refugees from the Asian country and show greater compassion towards people fleeing the Taliban.
Richard Bennett has made the plea nearly four years after the Taliban retook Kabul, when western forces, led by the US, left the country in 2021 after two decades of war. Since then, the Taliban has introduced a series of draconian restrictions on women in the country and banned them from many aspects of public life.
“Afghans are not coming to the UK because the streets are paved with gold,” he told The Independent. “They are coming because they are persecuted, and life is very hard for them. Nobody wants to be a refugee.”
Britain pledged to accept 20,000 refugees over five years under the Home Office’s scheme for vulnerable Afghans. By December 2024, it had seen 34,940 arrivals from Afghanistan and provided accommodation to nearly 26,000 of them.
Many vulnerable Afghans have resorted to taking boats across the Channel from continental Europe. But after reaching the UK, many have also found themselves separated from their families, leading to further mental anguish.
“They are refugees who have been persecuted in a war and now by an oppressive regime,” said Mr Bennett, who was banned by the Taliban last year from entering Afghanistan. “They are truly the classic definition of a refugee.”
He said there are some countries providing asylum to distressed Afghan women and that even the women escaping the Taliban lived with survivors’ guilt.
“The situation is so repressive that it meets the definition of persecution for every class of that gender,” he said. “I come from New Zealand, and we had a prime minister who asked people to be kind. So that’s what I would do too – to be kind to Afghan refugees, please.”
Since his appointment by the UN Human Rights Council in 2022, Mr Bennett has produced multiple reports highlighting the plight of Afghan women and minorities in particular under the hardline Islamist rule of the Taliban.
In September last year, the Taliban said that his reports were “based on prejudices and anecdotes detrimental to interests of Afghanistan and Afghans”.
The special rapporteur, though, has continued speaking for and with Afghans. “We’re trying to understand the scale and the gravity of the Taliban’s rule. There are women tortured in prison, sometimes sexually abused, beaten and threatened. The threats basically are orders to stop protesting and getting guarantees from male family members to ‘stay at home, keep your head down, don't tell anybody about this, and don't leave the country’. So, their women are being totally silenced,” he said.
Mr Bennett said he was aware of two cases where members of the Taliban allegedly made videos of women in compromising situations and threatened to release the footage if they spoke out.
“Well, actually, if you knew your history, this is predictable,” he said. “The Taliban spokesperson said the sight of women through a window is enough to lead to obscene acts. In the 21st century, it is pathetic that you have to cover the window up to not protect the woman but the man from losing control. It is bizarre,” he said, noting the Taliban’s edicts, including the latest one banning women from appearing near uncovered windows, mirrored rules from the group’s rule in the 1990s.
“It shows how women and girls are not considered the equal of men and boys but rather inferior human beings. This is not a situation that any country, any other country can accept in the 21st century.”
Speaking recently at the Herat Security Dialogue in Spain, the UN rapporteur described the situation of Afghan women and girls under the Taliban rule as “hell”.
In his latest report, Mr Bennett said the Taliban’s refusal to allow him into Afghanistan was sending out a negative signal about the group’s willingness to meet international obligations.
Almost four years after taking power, he pointed out, the Taliban was yet to gain international recognition and establish formal ties with any country.
Several countries have said the Taliban’s path to international recognition was stuck due to its position on women’s rights. The group has barred most girls over the age of 12 from formal education, banned women from parks and from travelling long distances without a male guardian.
Mr Bennett has also highlighted the plight of the LGBTI+ community in Afghanistan. He has been looking into reports about the Taliban sentencing a man in a same-sex relationship to death by burial under a wall. “We have been looking into it. It was a couple of years ago, but we have not verified it yet,” he said.
He has been in touch with members of the LGBTI+ community in Afghanistan to document their plight. Mr Bennett said: “I have had video calls from a safe house, where they have shown me wounds from being beaten up by the police,” he said, adding that the community’s situation wasn’t any easier under the previous government backed by the West.
“They are expected to meet gender norms and can be targeted for how they dress. If you are a man [you’re expected to] have a beard – which may not be what they want to do – and dress in a certain way or walk in a certain way, and they’ll draw attention to themselves by being themselves.”
Mr Bennett quoted a transgender woman telling him that her family members had been detained and beaten by people affiliated with the Taliban after she fled the country. “They do not see us as human,” she told him.
If the US or the UK wanted to engage with the Taliban, Mr Bennett said the first step should be to avoid normalising the Taliban rule “without any significant, verified and measurable improvements in the human rights situation of Afghans”.
“Use that leverage that the international community has – be it political or financial or sanctions – a range of actions can put pressure on the Taliban. And to be clear, I am not against dialogue,” he told The Independent.
“I have always been for dialogue, and the US and the UK need to consistently raise their concerns about human rights when they engage with the Taliban – not skirt around or avoid it. You could speak to them about water quality or airspace or trade or anything under the sun, but human rights have to be central to it.”
