JURIST EXCLUSIVE – Law students and lawyers in Afghanistan are filing reports with JURIST on the situation there after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Here, a lawyer in Kabul with experience in the country’s financial sector offers his observations and perspective on the circumstances facing the country’s banks and banking system under the new regime.  For privacy and security reasons we are withholding his name and institutional affiliation. The text has been only lightly edited to respect the author’s voice.

The Private Higher Education Institutions (PHEI) and Aghanistan’s Taliban-led Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) have come up with a plan which states that all students, employees, and professors of Private Higher Education shall appear covering themselves with Hejab. The plan is accompanied by an official letter to all PHEIs by the MoHE also stating that boys and girls shall be separated in different classes.

Additionally, the letter states that if the PHEIs are unable to separate classes of male and female students, they shall be taught in different time periods. For example, if boys come to classes in the morning, then girls shall come in the afternoon. In a separate note by the MoHE, classes in which has more than 15 girls shall be separated from boys and if the number of girls is less than 15, a partition shall be established inside the classrooms.

Additionally, the MoHE also stated that girls shall only be taught by female professors. If there are no female professors, elderly male professors can teach girls in universities.

I have to mention that there are 131 PHEIs in Afghanistan. I believe no Islamic state on the planet has enforced policies such as the Taliban are planning to implement.

Taking into account the above, I believe it shows how quickly the Taliban have prepared policies and how quickly they are willing to implement them. But I also believe that the officials at the MoHE do not understand that due to the economic crisis the PHEIs many not be able to provide the students sufficient classrooms, professors, education martials as well as curriculum, and etc.

I doubt that the MoHE may be able to implement such policies in public universities due to the economic crisis and large number of both male and female students. Also, I note that many professors and even students who could talk English and were educated abroad have already left the country.

A PHEI called Gawhar Shad already announced in its Facebook page that the students shall comply with Hejab requirements and different classrooms are identified for students.

To be honest I did not expect anything other than the above from the Taliban-led MoHE. They have no development plan for the education system of the country. It seems that two decades of development will be demolished, which is a great discouragement to students, especially female students.