Guterres calls on Taliban to return girls to schools one year after banning them

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday reiterated his call on the Taliban to allow Afghan girls to return to schools, all on the one-year anniversary of their being banned from access to education.

“This Sunday marks one year since girls were banned from school in Afghanistan. A year of knowledge and lost opportunities that they will never get back,” Guterres has lamented in a message on his Twitter account.

In this regard, the UN secretary general has demanded the Taliban — who seized Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on August 15, 2021 — to let girls into schools.

“Girls should be in school. The Taliban must let them back in,” Guterres has said.

Last year, after the children returned to school, the Taliban announced that only boys could go to class, while female students had to stay at home.

Since then, they have promised on several occasions that the reopening of classes for female students from secondary school onwards in Afghanistan would take place “in the near future,” a decision reminiscent of the previous Taliban regime between 1996 and 2001, when they also assured that girls would return to school when the situation improved.

Taliban authorities have faced criticism for closing schools and excluding female students from them, amid a battery of discriminatory measures against women that keep them away from their jobs and govern aspects of their daily lives.

The Taliban have installed a government marked by a lack of women and representatives of other political groups. Despite this, Afghanistan’s deputy prime minister, Abdulsalam Hanafi, stressed in October that this executive “is inclusive” and added that the fundamentalist group has tried to incorporate all ethnic groups and social sectors in the new authorities.