GENEVA, Feb 27 - Restrictions introduced by the Taliban are putting women's and children's lives at risk by blocking access to urgent medical care, a U.N. human rights expert said on Friday.
Richard Bennett, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, told a press briefing that the regulations in effect require sick or injured women to conform to a dress code, to be accompanied by a male guardian, and to be treated by male medics. He said women are frequently denied ambulance services if they are unaccompanied by a man.
Bennett described specific incidents in a report submitted this week to the U.N. Human Rights Council. In one account, a woman in labour was left to give birth at the hospital gate because she arrived without a male guardian. In another case, a woman lost her four-year-old son because she could not travel to a hospital unaccompanied.
"The Taliban’s restrictions must be reversed, otherwise they will be killing people," Bennett said at the Geneva briefing. "These policies are not isolated measures. They form an institutionalised system of gender discrimination that denies women and girls autonomy over their own bodies, health, and futures."
Bennett told attendees he had shared the report with Taliban authorities and asked for their comments, but received no reply. The Taliban has said it respects women's rights in accordance with its interpretation of Islamic law.
Medical workforce dynamics are a central concern in Bennett's findings. As of last year, roughly one quarter of Afghanistan's medical workers were women. Bennett warned that a ban on women's medical education has interrupted the pipeline that supplies female clinicians. Given gender segregation policies, he said this shutdown will mean fewer women available in future to treat female patients.
"It's a completely unjustifiable policy. It puts the entire health system in jeopardy, and unless reversed, it will lead to unnecessary suffering, illness and death," Bennett added.
At the same press briefing, Suraya Dalil, a former health minister of Afghanistan, expressed particular alarm about rising deaths related to childbirth. "Unfortunately, we expect higher mortality - maternal mortality (and) infant mortality - in the coming years because of the fact that the health workforce are systematically restricted," she said.
The report situates these healthcare restrictions alongside other measures the Taliban has taken since returning to power in 2021. Those measures include limits on women's movement, bans on girls' education beyond primary school, and laws described as morality regulations that also constrain expression and employment.
Bennett's account links immediate operational barriers - such as ambulance denials and treatment restrictions - with longer-term structural effects from a shrinking pool of trained female medical workers. The combination, he warned, creates both direct life-threatening events and a degraded capacity of the health system to meet women's and children's needs in the future.
While the Taliban indicates its policies align with its interpretation of Islamic law, the U.N. report documents a pattern of institutionalised gender discrimination in healthcare settings that, according to Bennett and Dalil, is having fatal consequences and threatens to worsen maternal and infant health outcomes.