Female Student, Who Accused Former Taliban Official of Rape, Goes Missing From Islamabad

The Victorian Council said that the Young Voltaire award has been given to those who are under 30 years old and have worked in the field of human rights, civil rights, and freedom of expression.

According to the organisation, Mohammadi and Askari are joint recipients of the Young Voltaire award in 2022.

This organisation has said that these two young Hazara human rights activists have shown persistence, bravery, and commitment to letting the world know that Afghanistan is burning.

Sitarah Mohammadi was born during the previous Taliban regime and had no access to education until the age of eight. Mohammadi is currently a Ph.D. student at Monash University in Australia and a Provost Research Fellow at Oxford University. She is also the spokesperson of the "World Hazara Council".

According to Victorian Council, Sajjad Askari also entered Australia via a boat in 2012. Askari has a BA in International Relations and is currently a Ph.D. student of law at Monash University. He also writes for media outlets such as the Guardian, and Al Jazeera English.

The Taliban-controlled, Bakhtar News Agency, has also published a report of Kabir’s meeting with Hazara community elders.

According to the news agency, the tribal elders have discussed problems and suggestions of Shia and Hazara community with Mawlawi Abdul Kabir.

No further details of the meeting have been reported.

Hazaras have been subject to systematic killings in Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban. Since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the Hazara community continues to be heavily persecuted and targeted, with little done to protect them from suicide bombings and other unlawful attacks. Human rights groups have repeatedly announced that after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, members of the Hazara and Shia community of Afghanistan have been systematically attacked.

Canada and the Netherlands, as the co-chairs of the MFC, said in a statement on Friday that the decision regarding Afghanistan has been made in consultation with the member states.

Afghanistan became a member of the MFC in January 2020.

According to the coalition’s statement, the Taliban have imposed serious restrictions on media freedom that have threatened the safety and well-being of journalists and media workers.

According to this coalition, the continued harassment, attacks, and detention of journalists and exclusion of women from the media scene have led to a rapid loss of media independence and put journalists’ lives at risk daily.

MFC stressed that the organisation will continue to closely monitor the situation of press freedom in Afghanistan.

After the takeover of Afghanistan, border clashes between forces of the Taliban in Afghanistan and forces of its neighbouring countries, including Uzbekistan, have been reported.

In one incident, the president of Uzbekistan had confirmed the death of an Uzbek soldier due to a gunbattle on the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan border.

The Central Asian countries have also expressed grave concerns about the emergence of Islamic State-Khurasan (IS-K) terror outfit on their borders with Afghanistan.

HRW in its report also stated that Afghans facing imminent deportation are often given no opportunity to make refugee claims. The rights organisation urged Turkey to immediately halt pushbacks of Afghans from its borders and give all Afghans facing removal the opportunity to make refugee claims

The report claimed that HRW had written to the Turkish authorities on October 18 seeking a response to the alleged pushbacks and deportations. “The Presidency of Migration Management in Turkey’s Interior Ministry reported 238,448 “irregular migrants whose entrance to our country has been prevented” in 2022, most of them Afghans. Turkey reported deporting 44,768 Afghans by air to Kabul in the first eight months of 2022, a 150 percent increase over the first eight months of 2021,” the report stated.

“Although Turkey has rightly earned international acclaim and support for hosting the largest number of refugees of any country in the world, it is simultaneously pushing many Afghans back at its borders or deporting them to Afghanistan with little or no examination of their claims for international protection,” said Bill Frelick, refugee and migrant rights director at Human Rights Watch.

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees of any country in the world, an estimated 3.9 million people, 3.6 million Syrians with temporary protection and 320,000 others, mostly Afghans.

Since taking power, the Taliban have imposed severe restrictions across Afghanistan, carried out revenge killings and enforced disappearances of former government officials and security force personnel, detained and beaten journalists, summarily executed alleged Islamic State fighters, and failed to protect groups targeted for attack by the Islamic State, such as ethnic Hazaras.

HRW stated that pushbacks violate multiple human rights norms, including the prohibition of collective expulsion under the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to due process in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the principle of nonrefoulement under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which prohibits the return of refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened.