Day: June 21, 2024

islamabad — The United Nations confirmed Friday that a rare meeting of global envoys with Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers this month will not address concerns about Afghan civil society and women human rights defenders.

  

Roza Otunbayeva, the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, emphasized the importance of the world community opening a direct dialogue with the Taliban, suggesting it could create opportunities for Afghan women to participate in future talks.

“This is what is possible today. … It is a process. Let’s start to speak,” she told reporters in New York after briefing a U.N. Security Council meeting on the Afghan situation.  

  

The two-day U.N.-hosted meeting will commence in Doha, Qatar, on June 30. It will be the third session of what is referred to as the “Doha process,” and the Taliban have agreed to attend for the first time. 

  

“For the first time, special envoys of all the countries would meet face to face with the Taliban. They would tell them that, ‘Look, it doesn’t work like this, and we should have women around the table, and also provide them with access to the business,’ ” Otunbayeva said.  

  

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched and hosted the Doha process in May 2023 to establish a coherent and unified global approach to engagement with the Taliban government, which has yet to be formally recognized by the world. 

Guterres did not invite de facto Afghan authorities to the first meeting. The Taliban refused an invitation to the second round of talks in February unless their delegates could be accepted as the sole representatives of Afghanistan. 

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have criticized the U.N. for inviting the Taliban to the Doha huddle rather than holding them accountable for “crimes” against Afghan women and girls. 

  

Otunbayeva responded to the criticism Friday, saying the U.N. would consult civil society representatives from inside and outside Afghanistan before the June 30 meeting. They also will speak to special international envoys on July 2, a day after the meeting with the Taliban ends, she noted.

Help for businesses, farmers

The UNAMA chief explained that discussions at the third Doha meeting will focus on helping Afghan private businesses, addressing financial and banking sector issues, and finding alternate livelihoods for farmers affected by the Taliban’s nationwide ban on opium poppy cultivation.

She said all these issues are related to women: “There are 5 million addicted people in Afghanistan. More than 30% [of them] are women.”

Otunbayeva said the Taliban expect international assistance and capacity building in the security, agriculture and health sectors.  

  

“What do we need [in return]? We need them to change their minds and let girls go to school. I don’t understand what is the reason why they don’t let girls go to school. There is no Islamic country out of 57 where girls don’t go to schools.”  

  

The Taliban regained power in Kabul in August 2021 as U.S.-led NATO troops withdrew from the country after nearly 20 years of involvement in the Afghan war. The fundamentalist authorities have since barred girls aged 12 and older from attending secondary school and have suspended female students from universities as well as other higher education.  

  

Most Afghan women are prohibited from public and private employment, including the U.N., and they are not allowed to visit public places such as parks, gyms and bathhouses. Women are required to undertake road or air trips only when accompanied by a male relative.

The Taliban dismiss criticism of their policies, insisting they are aligned with Afghan culture and Islamic law.

Agnes Callamard, the secretary-general at Amnesty International, said in a statement Friday that the credibility of the Doha meeting “will be in tatters if it doesn’t adequately address” the Afghan human rights situation and fails to engage Afghan women rights defenders. 

  

“Sidelining critical discussions on human rights would be unacceptable and set a deeply damaging precedent,” Callamard said. She urged the international community to adopt a clear and united stance to protect the rights of Afghan women.   

  

“Caving into the Taliban’s conditions to secure their participation in the talks would risk legitimizing their gender-based institutionalized system of oppression — a system that has sought to erase women and girls from society by callously stripping them of their most fundamental rights,” she said.

Tirana Hassan, the executive director at Human Rights Watch, described the exclusion of Afghan women from the upcoming Doha talks as shocking. 

  

“Excluding women risks legitimizing the Taliban’s abuses and triggering irreparable harm to the U.N.’s credibility as an advocate for women’s rights and women’s meaningful participation,” Hassan said in a statement issued Friday.

VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed to this report.

fort pierce, florida — Lawyers for Donald Trump argued Friday that the Justice Department prosecutor who charged the former president with hoarding classified documents at his Florida estate was illegally appointed and that the case should therefore be dismissed.

The challenge to the legality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment kicked off a three-day hearing that will further delay a criminal case that had been scheduled for trial last month but has been snarled by unresolved legal disputes. The motion questioning Smith’s selection by the Justice Department is one of multiple challenges to the indictment the defense has raised, so far unsuccessfully, in the year since the charges were brought.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon heard hours of arguments Friday from lawyers for both sides, with Trump attorney Emil Bove asserting that the Justice Department risked creating a “shadow government” through the appointment of special counsels to prosecute select criminal cases. Prosecutors say there was nothing improper or unusual about Smith’s appointment, with James Pearce, a member of Smith’s team at one point saying: “We are in compliance. We have complied with all of the department’s policies.” 

Cannon did not immediately rule, but in an apparent sign that she was taking seriously the Trump team motion, she grilled Pearce on what oversight role Attorney General Merrick Garland — who appointed Smith — had in seeking the indictment.

Pearce said he was not in a position to answer the question but noted, “I don’t want to make it seem like I’m hiding something.”

Even as Smith’s team looks to press forward on a prosecution seen by many legal experts as the most straightforward and clear-cut of the four prosecutions against Trump, Friday’s arguments didn’t concern the allegations against the former president. They centered instead on arcane regulations governing the appointment of Justice Department special counsels like Smith, reflecting the judge’s continued willingness to entertain defense arguments that prosecutors say are frivolous and meritless, contributing to the delay of a trial date.

 

Arbiter’s review ordered

Cannon, a Trump appointee, had exasperated prosecutors even before the June 2023 indictment by granting a Trump request to have an independent arbiter review the classified documents taken from Mar-a-Lago — an order that was overturned by a unanimous federal appeals panel.

Since then, she has been intensely scrutinized over her handling of the case, including for taking months to issue rulings and for scheduling hearings on legally specious claims — all of which have combined to make a trial before the November presidential election a virtual impossibility. She was rebuked in March by prosecutors after she asked both sides to formulate jury instructions and to respond to a premise of the case that Smith’s team called “fundamentally flawed.”

The New York Times, citing two anonymous sources, reported Thursday that two judges — including the chief federal judge in the Southern District of Florida — urged Cannon to step aside from the case shortly after she was assigned to it.

The hearing is unfolding just weeks after Trump was convicted in a separate state case in New York of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn actor who has said she had sex with him. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to issue within days an opinion on whether Trump is immune from prosecution for acts he took in office or whether he can be prosecuted by Smith’s team on charges that he schemed to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

At issue in Friday’s hearing was a Trump team claim that Smith was illegally appointed in November 2022 by Garland because he was not first approved by Congress and because the special counsel office that he was assigned to lead was not also created by Congress.

Smith’s team has said Garland was fully empowered as the head of the Justice Department to make the appointment and to delegate prosecutorial decisions to him. They note that a similar argument failed in a challenge to the appointment of Robert Mueller, who was tapped as special counsel by the Trump administration Justice Department to investigate potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

On Monday, the two sides will again discuss matters related to Smith’s appointment, as well as a limited gag order that prosecutors have requested to bar Trump from comments they fear could endanger the safety of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials involved in the case.

The restrictions were sought after Trump falsely claimed the agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents in August 2022 were prepared to kill him even though he was citing boilerplate language from standard FBI policy about use of force during the execution of search warrants. The FBI had intentionally selected a day for the search when it knew Trump and his family would be out of town, and the policy he was citing is meant to limit, rather than encourage, the use of force.

Trump’s lawyers have said any speech restrictions would infringe on his free-speech rights. Cannon initially rejected the prosecution’s request on technical grounds, saying Smith’s team had not sufficiently conferred with defense lawyers before seeking the restrictions. Prosecutors subsequently renewed the request.