The Taliban says it has provided 'a comfortable and prosperous life' for women in Afghanistan. 'Absurd' says a human rights advocate.

• The supreme leader of the Taliban says that the organization's rule has been good for women.
• The Taliban's record on women's rights says otherwise.

The supreme leader of the Taliban announced on Sunday that the organization has taken "necessary steps" for the "betterment of women" in Afghanistan but human rights experts say the country continues to experience some of the world's worst women's rights abuses.

During an address ahead of Eid al-Adha, Hibatullah Akhundzada said that under the Taliban, "necessary steps have been taken for the betterment of women as half of society in order to provide them with a comfortable and prosperous life according to the Islamic Shariah," the Associated Press reported.

This includes measures to prevent women from entering forced marriages, he said.

"The status of women as a free and dignified human being has been restored and all institutions have been obliged to help women in securing marriage, inheritance, and other rights," Akhundzada said, per the AP.

Akhundzada's statements are in direct opposition to the international scrutiny the Taliban has faced from human rights organizations, the UN, and various nations since it took over after the US and international forces withdrew troops from the country in 2021. Most notably, the Taliban has been scrutinized for barring women from getting an education past the sixth grade, ordering that they completely veil their faces in public, limiting the jobs they can hold, and barring them from going to parks.

"Their claim that their policies in the past or in the future reflect a concern about the well-being of women are unsupported and, frankly, absurd," John Sifton, the advocacy director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, told Insider. "The restrictions on work and education go to the very heart of what women's rights are all about — the freedom to make choices about your own life. This is what human rights are."

In March, the UN declared Afghanistan the world's most repressive country for women. In a recent Human Rights Council meeting, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif declared women in Afghanistan are "discriminated against in every way." Other countries with records of abuses against women, like Saudi Arabia, have also spoken out against some of the Taliban's restrictive policies.

Sifton said the statements claiming that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has empowered women despite so much evidence showing otherwise is most likely part of an effort to establish its legitimacy on an international stage. The UN recently said it is "nearly impossible" to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government because of human rights issues.

"The Taliban leadership craves legitimacy. They want to be recognized by other governments and international institutions like the United Nations," Sifton told Insider. "But the reason that outside governments and the United Nations are reluctant to recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan is, in large part, because of their horrible record on women's rights."

Since the Taliban's take over of Afganistan, women in the country have been protesting and speaking out against the restrictive rules put in place by the organization. Yalda Royan, a feminist activist who fled Kabul with her two daughters in 2021 after the Taliban took over, told Insider's Charles Davis last year that the country "has now become a kind of cage for Afghan women; the birds who cannot fly out of it, just stuck inside the home without rights to movement, rights to education, rights to work — any basic right."

Sifton said that despite this vocal opposition, Taliban leadership continues to argue that imposed rules align with what Afghan citizens want for their country. Sifton said the opposite is true.

"In speaking about women's rights, human rights groups and outside governments are merely reflecting what Afghan women and girls themselves have said. The Taliban can simply ask the women and girls of Afghanistan what they want," Sifton told Insider, "and they will find that they do not want these restrictions on women's rights, education, and work."

"In many ways, the crisis for women's rights in Afghanistan is a reflection of the crisis of the Taliban not being the democratically elected government."