RASC News Agency: A group of prominent Afghanistani women’s rights activists has issued a searing condemnation of the ongoing mass deportation of Afghanistani refugees from Iran and Pakistan, describing the process as a flagrant and systematic violation of international human rights standards. In an open letter addressed to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the evening of Saturday, July 13, the signatories expressed deep alarm over what they termed the “humiliating, violent, and unjustified expulsion” of tens of thousands of vulnerable individuals particularly women into the hands of a regime that has institutionalized gender apartheid and political persecution.
The letter states in no uncertain terms:
“The forced return of Afghanistani refugees especially women and girls to a country where fundamental rights are obliterated, education is criminalized, and systemic violence is enshrined in state practice under Taliban rule, constitutes not merely a policy failure but an act of cruelty with potentially fatal consequences.” These women’s rights defenders warned that for many female returnees, repatriation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is equivalent to a ‘silent death sentence’. The regime’s brutal edicts against women banning education, employment, freedom of movement, and public visibility have turned daily life into a struggle for mere survival.
“Through policies of gender exclusion, enforced invisibility, corporal punishment, and public floggings, the Taliban have constructed a system of governance that methodically strips women of their agency and humanity. Repatriating women to this structure is tantamount to collaboration with oppression,” the activists wrote. This urgent appeal comes as UNHCR confirms a dramatic rise in deportations. According to Arafat Jamal, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan, Iran alone is deporting up to 50,000 Afghanistani refugees each day a number that reflects an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Most of those expelled arrive in devastated physical and emotional condition, having endured degrading treatment, prolonged displacement, and abrupt uprooting.
The letter highlights the particularly cruel impact of deportation on women and girls, who after experiencing relative freedoms in host countries are being thrust back into a regime that has all but erased their presence from public life. “Taliban officials have implemented draconian policies that bar women from working, ban girls from schooling, and criminalize their appearance in public without male guardianship. These actions amount to a state-sponsored campaign of gender annihilation.” The signatories stress that the international community bears a moral and legal obligation to act. They urge UN agencies, donor governments, and rights institutions to suspend all forced returns of Afghanistani refugees and provide immediate humanitarian protections, especially for women at risk of persecution.
The warning comes amid growing backlash against Iran and Pakistan’s deportation policies. Numerous international rights groups have labeled the deportations as “inhumane, vindictive, and in direct violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention.” Many have questioned how governments can, in good faith, justify sending individuals back to a regime that executes former soldiers, jails journalists, and publicly flogs women. Indeed, under the Taliban’s rule since August 2021, Afghanistan has become one of the most repressive societies on Earth, particularly for women. The regime’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has supplanted all semblance of civil governance, replacing law with theological terror.
In their final plea, the activists write:
“Hope is rapidly vanishing for Afghanistani women. If the world remains indifferent to their fate, the Taliban will not just erase them from Afghanistani society they will erase them from history.” They call on the UN and its partners to take concrete, immediate steps not only to stop the deportations, but to recognize Afghanistani women as a protected class under international law, entitled to asylum and dignity.
As deportation buses continue to cross Afghanistani borders and return the vulnerable to the clutches of authoritarianism, the world is being watched not by diplomats or regimes, but by women forced to choose between exile and extinction.
