Afghanistan

A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called "honour" killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse.

The small but significant change to Afghanistan's criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Most violence against women in Afghanistan is within the family, so the law – passed by parliament but awaiting the signature of the president, Hamid Karzai – will effectively silence victims as well as most potential witnesses to their suffering.

Conclusions:

As shown in this report the recorded statistics on violence against women during the first six months of the current year has reached a shocking number of 4154 cases.

This figure indicates an increase of nearly 25 percent compared to the number of violence against women recorded in the first six months of the previous year. However, this increase could be due to increased public confidence in the AIHRC’s offices, but can be caused by other factors such as increased violence against women and the public's distrust of judicial authorities as well.

In any way, this high figure of violence against women in the first half of this year is very shocking and a matter to be pondered upon. Especially when we see that over 30% of the figures are physical violence, especially beating, slapping, kicking and throwing stones, the issue becomes more and more worrying because physical violence against women is the naked (harsh) form of violence against women.

A couple of months ago I went back to my native Afghanistan after a year living in Britain. From the sedate surroundings of York University I've found myself back in bustling Kabul - back to the traffic jams, the construction projects and the crazy rush hour. Quite a change.

What has amazed me most upon my return is the massive difference between the realities of life at home and the way that Afghan women are more often than not portrayed in foreign media, which tends to focus on the sorrows, failures and victimised faces of Afghan women.

Twelve years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan's government is considering bringing back a gruesome spectacle that became synonymous with Islamist cruelty: the use of public stoning as a punishment for sex outside marriage.

The sentence for married adulterers, along with flogging for unmarried offenders, appears in a draft revision of the country's penal code being drawn up by the ministry of justice.

It is the latest in a string of encroachments on hard-won rights for women, after parliament quietly cut the number of seats set aside for women on provincial councils, and drew up a criminal code whose provisions will make it almost impossible to convict anyone for domestic violence.