8am: At least eight people have been killed over the past 24 hours in separate incidents in some provinces of Afghanistan, sources reported. In the first case, two women and one man were murdered by unknown individuals in Khogyani district of Nangarhar province on Sunday. The victims’ bodies were found Monday by the local residents. The motive behind the murders however is not yet clear. Click here to read more (external link).
Taliban says 5.1 earthquake jolts northeastern Afghanistan
AP: A 5.1 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday jolted the Afghan city of Faizabad, the capital city of northeastern Badakhshan province, a Taliban official said. Abdul Wahid Rayan, the director of the Taliban news agency Bakhtar, said the center of the quake was Shaghnan district and it was felt in other parts of the province. Click here to read more (external link).
Afghanistan, Venezuela Among Candidates for UN Rights Body
Margaret Besheer
VOA News
October 10, 2022
NEW YORK — The U.N. General Assembly will vote Tuesday to admit 14 countries to the 47-member Human Rights Council; among them are some candidates with poor rights records, including Afghanistan and Venezuela.
Seventeen candidate countries from five regional groups are running, but only two groups — Asia-Pacific and Latin America and Caribbean states — face a real contest. The other three groups are running “clean slates”— although countries will still need a simple majority of the secret ballots to make it onto the Geneva-based council.
Venezuela is in a contested group. It will face Chile and Costa Rica for two available seats.
“Venezuela’s vengeful assault on critics of the government makes the country unfit for membership in the U.N.’s top rights body,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Returning this abusive government to the council would undermine the U.N.’s credibility by rewarding Venezuelan authorities with a role in judging other countries’ human rights while they brutalize their population.”
A U.N. fact-finding mission said in a September report that President Nicolas Maduro’s intelligence agency has suppressed the country’s opposition through arbitrary detentions and torture that amounted to war crimes. On Friday, the human rights council renewed the mission’s mandate for another two years.
The Maduro government has dismissed the accusations as “false and unfounded.”
“U.N. member states will soon have the opportunity to close the door on Venezuela’s return to the Human Rights Council,” Charbonneau added. “With the likes of China, Eritrea and Cuba already on the council, the U.N. rights body would benefit from having one fewer member who’s a walking advertisement for torture and other abuses, and impunity.”
Another controversial candidate is Afghanistan, which has been in the headlines for the past year for the Taliban’s mistreatment of women, girls and minorities, and their broad crackdown on personal freedoms.
Countries that join the council are expected to “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights” both at home and abroad.
While Afghanistan is de facto under Taliban control, its U.N. seat is still in the hands of the previous government, in large part because no country has officially recognized the Taliban regime. If elected, it would be the hold-over diplomats who are loyal to the previous government who would take the HRC seat.
Afghanistan will face Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, South Korea and Vietnam in its regional group for four vacant seats.
Human Rights Watch is critical of Vietnam’s human rights record, saying the one-party rule of the Communist Party systematically suppresses basic civil and political rights. Government critics are often subjected to police harassment, arbitrary arrest and jail.
In the African regional bloc, Algeria, Morocco, South Africa and Sudan are competing uncontested for four seats. In the Eastern Europe group, Georgia and Romania are running a so-called clean slate, as are Belgium and Germany in the Western European and Others group.
Members serve for a period of three years and are not eligible for immediate re-election after serving two consecutive terms. The new members will start their terms on January 1, 2023.
Criticism
The council has a mixed reputation. Diplomats say it has produced some important and strong reports on war crimes in places such as Syria and spotlights domestic abuses in North Korea, Iran and Myanmar, among others. But it is also frequently criticized for its focus on Israel and the inclusion among its members of several countries with poor rights records of their own such as China and Pakistan.
This year, the council took the rare action of suspending a member for its bad behavior.
On April 7, Russia became only the second state to be suspended (Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya was the first) from the HRC, when the General Assembly voted Moscow off for atrocities it has been accused of in its war in Ukraine. The Czech Republic was voted to finish the remainder of the term through December 2023.
The Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to replace the dysfunctional U.N. Human Rights Commission, which was disbanded.
Some information in this report came from Reuters.
Tolo News in Dari – October 10, 2022
Taliban Pulled the Corpses of Two NRF Fighters Out of Graves in Panjshir Province
8am: Taliban fighters pulled the bodies of two NRF fighters from their graves in Panjshir province. The incident took place on Sunday (October 9th) in Dara district, Panjshir province. The corpses of these two NRF forces were buried in Koukzar mountains in Dara district. Reports indicate that the Taliban have pulled the bodies of these two National Resistance Front (NRF) forces out of the grave because they thought they were buried with their weapons. Click here to read more (external link).
“We are erased.”
Mahbouba Seraj
UN: “We are erased,” said Mahbooba Seraj, a human rights activist from Afghanistan. “Today the human rights in Afghanistan does not exist. Women of Afghanistan do not exist for the Taliban.” Seraj is an Afghan women’s rights activist based in Afghanistan. She chose to stay in the country after the Taliban takeover to be a witness of what was going to be happening and be able to tell the world about it, she said. Seraj was one of the speakers during a discussion on the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan during the Human Rights Council. Click here to read more (external link).
More Than 50% of Afghans Struggle with Mental Problems: HRW
8am: Marking World Mental Health Day, HRW published a report Monday citing the former government’s documents that in Afghanistan, which has been devastated by 40 years of armed conflict, it is estimated that more than half the population, including many survivors of conflict-related violence, experience depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, but fewer than 10 percent receive adequate psychosocial support from the state. Ukraine, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Gaza, Iraq, South Sudan and Syria, in addition to Afghanistan, are countries where the level of mental illness is high. Click here to read more (external link).
Related
What Afghans want the rest of the world to know
The Atlantic: An Afghan women’s-rights activist had connected me with Hajera, who was too afraid to share her last name. “We had a job,” she told me. “We had money. We had a home. We had a country. We had a family.” Now, she said, “we have nothing.” Afghanistan is, once again, the worst place in the world to be a woman. Click here to read more (external link).
Why America Just Set Free the ‘Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan’
Bashir Noorzai
Daily Beast: “Noorzai isn’t the first drug smuggler the US [had] released; about 50 other drug traffickers were released after the Doha deal, but he is certainly the most prominent,” the official said. “All of them [released prisoners] have gone back to their narcotic business again, as will Noorzai. The Taliban continue to depend on drug trafficking and smuggling to sustain themselves financially.” Click here to read more (external link).
Intelligence Head Wasiq Meets Deputy CIA Head in Doha: Source
Tolo News: The head of intelligence of the Islamic Emirate [Taliban], Abdul Haq Wasiq, met with the deputy head of the CIA, David Cohen, and US special envoy Thomas West, an Islamic Emirate source told TOLOnews. “The Taliban are struggling to prevent ISIS-K attacks, making them look feckless, particularly in Kabul,” said Beth Sanner, a former Deputy Director of National Intelligence who led Afghanistan analysis at the CIA. Sanner is also a CNN contributor. Click here to read more (external link).
Related