Leading rights campaigners and Western officials have welcomed the release of Afghan education activist Matiullah Wesa after over seven months in Taliban custody, using the occasion to call for the release of the rest of the human rights defenders the militants have detained.
Wesa, who has campaigned for the education of girls and repeatedly called on the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan to reverse its bans on female education, was released earlier this week after spending 215 days in Taliban custody on charges he and his family had denied.
“I welcome the release of Matiullah Wesa and call for the immediate & unconditional release of all #Afghanistan human rights defenders who are arbitrarily detained for standing up for their own rights & the human rights of others,” Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He included links to detained activists Neda Parwani and Zholya Parsi.
I welcome the release of Matiullah Wesa and call for the immediate & unconditional release of all #Afghanistan human rights defenders who are arbitrarily detained for standing up for their own rights & the human rights of others. #ZhuliaParsi #NedaParwani #RasoulAbdi https://t.co/o4yALElJXW
— UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett (@SR_Afghanistan) October 26, 2023
The 30-year-old Wesa has campaigned for access to education for girls in Afghanistan through the independent volunteer education advocacy group PenPath, which he launched 14 years ago.
But since the Islamist Taliban regained power in August 2021 after a two-decade insurgency against the Western-backed government, it has deeply restricted the rights and freedoms of women and girls.
Wesa’s organization frequently held events in remote rural areas that called on the Taliban to reopen schools for teenage girls, which were closed soon after the hard-line Islamist group seized power.
Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women, girls, and human rights, said that Wesa “should never have been detained for standing up for the rights of Afghan girls to an education.”
The UN declared such arrests “deeply troubling and contrary to Afghanistan's international human rights obligations.”
Writing on X, Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, said he echoed comments by his colleagues welcoming Wesa’s release.
Wesa was detained in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on March 28 and charged with “inciting enmity against the regime.” His brother Attaullah Wesa told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi on October 26 that the activist had been sentenced to seven months imprisonment “because of false claims.”
The South Asia office of the global rights watchdog Amnesty International (AI) said Wesa should “never have been jailed for promoting girls' right to education.”
Samira Hamidi, a South Asia campaigner for AI, said Wesa’s release was “truly good news,” but she also called for the release of other Afghan activists detained by the Taliban.
Earlier this week, a women’s rights group in Kabul said that one of its members, Munizha Siddiqi, had spent a month in the Taliban detention on unknown charges.
Parwani and Parsi, meanwhile, have been in Taliban custody since September 19, and Rasul Abdi Parsi, a former Herat University professor who had written Facebook posts critical of authorities, was detained around the same time as Wesa.
Upon seizing power, the Taliban gave assurances that it would not return to the infamously brutal rule it employed while first in power from 1996 to 2001.
Since the takeover, the group has banned women from education, employment, and public life with few exceptions. Women are also required to observe a strict Islamic dress code and are required to travel with male guardians. They have been deprived of leisure and banned from parks and public baths in policies rooted in the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law.