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An unacceptable pattern is emerging in the way the Department of Home Affairs deals with visa applications for vulnerable Afghan women.

The Taliban celebrated the three-year anniversary of its takeover of Afghanistan in August with a military parade and a new set of vice and virtue laws making it illegal for women to speak outside the family home. The extremist group has been progressively cracking down on defenders of women’s human rights.

But Home Affairs has been requesting Afghan families remove their vulnerable female relatives from humanitarian visa applications. It also recently denied the application of a women’s human rights defender whose application was proposed by an Australian citizen more than two years ago.

When the Australian Federal Police was moved out of the Home Affairs portfolio, the department seems to have considered its responsibilities under Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security were transferred as well. They were not. The National Action Plan (NAP) prioritises the rights of women and girls in situations of armed conflict, including through humanitarian protection.

On their Afghanistan Update webpage, Home Affairs says that ‘members of identified minority groups (such as women and girls, ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+) who are referred by the UNHCR or proposed by a close family member in Australia’ will be given priority processing.

A locally engaged employee (LEE) of the Australia government, who spent 14 years working on the multinational base in Tarin Kowt and at the Australian Embassy in Kabul, shared correspondence with me showing Home Affairs asking his family to remove his mother from their humanitarian visa application in July.

The 68-year-old woman has depended financially and psychologically on her son for years. Rental agreements from Afghanistan and Pakistan—where she is living in limbo, having fled her home in Afghanistan—have been provided to the department, as have receipts for medical care.

The woman also depends on her son for her physical security. Her only son still residing in Afghanistan was imprisoned by the Taliban because of his brother’s links to Australia. If she were forced to return to Afghanistan, she would have no mahram (male relative or guardian) to accompany her and no one able to rent a house and pay her expenses.

Still, according to communication between Home Affairs and the LEE’s local member of parliament, the department determined that his mother did not meet the dependency criteria for the visa application. These criteria have not changed in the past three years.

Similarly, the department asked a Hazara family to remove their 23-year-old unmarried daughter from their family reunion application that was proposed by a family member residing in regional Australia.

Under the current gender apartheid regime of the Taliban, an unmarried 23-year-old faces many specific challenges in addition to the threats posed against her family. She also faces different threats than those faced by older women. Without the presence, protection and support of her family, this woman faces the increasing and serious threat of forced marriage and sexual abuse if imprisoned for breaking the laws restricting the movement and rights of women. She will not be allowed to work, rent a house or even use her voice in any public space.

Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security is designed to ensure that all relevant government departments implement the suite of UN Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace and Security, as well as General Recommendation 30 of the Committee on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and other international legal obligations relating to conflict and insecurity.

In General Recommendation 30, CEDAW reinforced and complemented the international legal protection regime for refugees, articulating the obligation to ensure responses to conflict and instability are gender sensitive. UN Security Council resolution 2122 recognises the need to better respond to analysis of the ‘impact of armed conflict on women and girls’. But it is CEDAW that specifically call for states parties, including Australia, to provide durable solutions for women and girls who are displaced.

General Recommendation 30 has an entire section dedicated to the unique vulnerabilities women and girls face when they are forcibly displaced, obliging states parties to ‘address the specific risks and particular needs of different groups of internally displaced and refugee women, subjected to multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, including women with disabilities, older women, girls, widows, women who head households … women belonging to ethnic, national, sexual or religious minorities, and women human rights defenders.’

Despite Australia’s current representation at CEDAW, Home Affairs last month denied a humanitarian visa application to a woman who was the co-founder and program director of an Afghan woman’s rights organisation. She and her organisation received threats from the Taliban because of the work they did advancing women’s rights, and women in similar circumstances have been disappeared.

The woman ran a range of women’s rights programs including a tertiary education scholarship for young Afghan women that was supported by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. She has been in exile in Pakistan for three years facing increasingly dire living circumstances and is no longer able to renew her Pakistani visa.

Yet, Home Affairs denied her on the basis that she was not facing sufficient persecution in her country of origin, or she had somewhere else to go, among other things. This is simply not true.

Home Affairs has faced multiple crises since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, and it is important it provides visas to address humanitarian issues in the Middle East, too. However, there is no excuse for such flagrant denial of Australia’s obligations to protect vulnerable Afghan women and girls through our humanitarian migration program.

The women of Afghanistan are now profoundly vulnerable—financially, psychologically and physically. This issue must be at the forefront as the department processes visa applications.

Susan Hutchinson is the Executive Director of Azadi-e Zan, an Afghan women’s rights organisation and is currently undertaking a PhD in International Relations at the Coral Bell School at the Australian National University.

This article was originally published on The Strategist.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.