Afghan women under Taliban rule are not allowed to speak in public.
Even so, a 17-year-old woman has won a prestigious global award for advocating for the rights of Afghan girls.
On Tuesday at a function in Amsterdam, Nila Ibrahimi won the International Children’s Peace Prize, an annual award for a child who has made a major contribution in advocating children’s rights.
Ibrahimi was honoured for her “courageous work to fight for the rights of girls” in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, who took power in 2021, have imposed harsh regulations that suppress women.
Here’s all we know about her.
About Nila Ibrahimi
Nila Ibrahimi, 17, is an activist advocating for the rights of Afghan girls.
She received the International Children’s Peace Prize on Tuesday; notable recipients of the prize include Malala Yousafzai, an advocate for girls’ education, and Greta Thunberg, a climate activist.
“We were all impressed and amazed by the courage of Nila. She had the courage to put her song online, the courage to initiate and start the singing movement,” said Marc Dullaert, the founder and chair of the KidsRights Foundation, according to The Independent.
“But also the resilience after fleeing with her family to Canada, that she still kept on advocating for Afghan girls, not only in Canada but also worldwide. She could have thought, ‘Well I’m safe now, and I’m focussing on my own life’, but (she had) the selflessness to really keep on advocating for Afghan girls.”
Ibrahimi gained fame before the Taliban takeover. She had used her voice to press Kabul’s education authorities to lift a prohibition on schoolgirls singing in public.
Her brother posted the video to social media after she recorded herself singing. After the IAmMySong campaign gained momentum, the restriction was lifted in a matter of weeks.
“That was the first time that I thought, wow. Like if I do want it, if I do think this is the way I want to live, I can speak up and that can be accepted,” she said in a video statement.
She was 15 when the
Taliban took control of Kabul and brought the country back to theocratic control.
Ibrahimi and her family escaped Afghanistan with the help of the 30 Birds Foundation, first to Pakistan and subsequently to Canada.
‘Her Story’
Since the release of her protest song in 2021, music has played a central role in Ibrahimi’s activism.
After fleeing Afghanistan, while she was at a safe house in Pakistan, she once again used her voice to help fund $4 million for the 30 Birds Foundation to transport another 200 girls from Afghanistan, according to The Independent.
She is still an advocate for Afghan girls from Canada.
After moving to Canada, Ibrahimi and her brother, Murtaza, founded Her Story, a digital space that gives Afghan women a voice and a platform to tell their stories to the world.
“Every single day I think of those girls who are left behind in Afghanistan, left with no hope. In Canada, I make decisions about my life and embrace the person I aspire to be, but what about them?” Ibrahimi said in a speech to the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy last year., according to CNN.
After speaking at the Geneva Summit and the House of Lords, Ibrahimi saw that there was “not a lot of awareness” about the situation in Afghanistan, which motivated her to create the platform.
Speaking about her initial journey as an activist, she told The Independent, “It was risky. It felt risky at the time, but maybe I didn’t grasp the whole idea of it, because I was just 13 or 14.”
“If women’s rights are suffering in one part of the world, the whole world will suffer in one way or another,” she said in the interview.
“This is something that is left unrecognised when we walk about girls’ education in Afghanistan, because we think of it as a problem just in Afghanistan. ‘Oh, it’s just a country over there, it’s far from our country’,” she added. “The most important message is not to forget about the girls of Afghanistan.”
Ibrahimi is currently applying to universities with the goal of studying law.
Afghan women under Taliban rule
The Taliban have settled in as rulers of Afghanistan, three years after they seized power in 2021.
Even if they have strengthened domestic security and kept a faltering economy afloat, their
numerous prohibitions on Afghan women and girls continue to make headlines.
They prohibited girls older than 12 from attending school.
Young women and girls are only permitted to leave the house with a male relative and are not permitted to work or study.
To avoid being accused of improper activity, they must cover themselves from head to toe and keep their eyes downcast. Additionally, they are not allowed to talk in public.
They cannot enter parks, gyms, or other public areas.
They also are unable to travel without permission.
Afghan women are also forbidden from praying loudly or reciting the Quran in front of other women, according to a Taliban government minister.
The Taliban assert that they are dedicated to enforcing Sharia, or their version of Islamic law, throughout Afghanistan, as per The Associated Press.
Anything that they perceive as alien or secular, like women working or going to school, is thus completely excluded.
It is the driving force behind their initial takeover of power in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and it has continued to do so since they regained authority on August 15, 2021.
Senior UN officials denounced the Taliban’s public execution last week and called for an immediate end to similar acts.
Richard Bennett, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations to Afghanistan, declared the execution to be a “clear violation of human rights.”
The Taliban have banned Bennett from Afghanistan on charges that he disseminated propaganda.
The extremist Islamist group has been accused of breaking the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women by Germany, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands.
In the past, the Taliban have called the accusations of gender discrimination against Afghanistan’s leaders “absurd.”
Spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat Fitrat declared, “No one is discriminated and human rights are protected in Afghanistan.”
With inputs from agencies