Michael de Laine

Girls’ schools in Pakistan’s Swat district under Taliban bomb threat

By Michael de Laine, Copenhagen, 16th January 2009

Girls’ schools in Pakistan’s Swat district will be bombed and schoolgirls attacked if orders by the Taliban to close the schools are not obeyed, says Sweden’s Fredrika-Bremer Association (FBF).

The association has called on the Pakistani government and the United Nations to fight to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

In an open letter to Pakistan’s ambassador to Sweden, Shaheen A Gillani, FBF says the right to education is a basic human right for all and that everyone is equally entitled to human rights without discrimination in accordance with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Women and girls nevertheless continue to be deprived of education, often due to long-standing traditions and/or ignorance.

In the Beijing Platform for Action, governments have committed themselves to ensuring universal and equal access to and completion of primary education by all children and to eliminating the existing gap between girls and boys, as stipulated in article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a commitment reiterated and refined in Millenium Development Goal 2, FBF says.

“We now read with dismay (’The Times’ of 26th December 2008) that the Taliban is once again imposing its militant rule, ordering the closure of all girl’s schools in the Swat district of Pakistan,” FBF says. “Announcements in mosques and on radio have given a deadline of 15th January 2009 for the Taliban order to be obeyed.”

The Taliban threatened to blow up school buildings and attack schoolgirls if the order is not carried out.

“The Pakistan government should be alarmed that if this type of practice is allowed to continue in the Swat district, which was once a relatively liberal area and a popular tourist destination, there is the likelihood that the Taliban will be encouraged to spread its tentacles further,” the Fredrika-Bremer Association says.

FBF called on Pakistan’s government, as a state party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination against Women and of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to:

• ensure women and girls equal rights with men and boys in the field of education
• recognise that it is the duty of states to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms, regardless of political, economic and cultural systems (as required by the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights)
• to declare that the type of edict issued by the Taliban is a violation of human rights
• to be brave enough to take strong action to protect the civil and human rights of its citizens, particularly women and girls

The organisation also called on the United Nations to condemn the actions by the Taliban and to give moral and active support to the Pakistan government in its fight to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

FBF, which is without political and religious affiliations, has worked for gender equality – for both women and men - since it was founded in 1884.