KABUL - About 400 women and girls are imprisoned across Afghanistan for moral crimes, a leading human rights group said on Wednesday, asking the Karzai administration to free the detainees.
The United States and other donor countries should press the Afghan government to end the “wrongful imprisonment”, Human Rights Watch said in a report released in Kabul. The women and girls were called crime victims, rather than criminals.

The 120-page report, “‘I Had to Run Away’: Women and Girls Imprisoned for Moral Crimes in Afghanistan” is based on 58 interviews conducted in three prisons and three juvenile detention facilities with women and girls.
According to the document, almost all girls in juvenile detention and about half of women in prisons have been held for moral crimes, including flight from forced marriage or domestic violence. Some of the detainees have been convicted of sex outside of marriage, after being raped or forced into prostitution.

While launching the report, the HRW executive director said: “It is shocking that 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, women and girls are still imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or forced marriage.”

Kenneth Roth said the fall of the Taliban government promised a new era of women’s rights. Significant improvements had occurred in education, maternal mortality, employment and the role of women in public life and governance, he acknowledged.

However, he called the imprisonment of women and girls for “moral crimes” just one sign of the difficult present and worrying future faced by Afghan females.
Running away is not a crime under the Afghan criminal code, but the Supreme Court has instructed judges to treat fleeing women and girls as criminals. Zina is a crime under Afghan law, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The detainees were subjected to abuses including forced and underage marriage, beatings, stabbings, burnings, rapes, forced prostitution, kidnapping and murder threats. But none of the cases had led even to an investigation, let alone prosecution.

A 19-year-old woman, named Parwana, told the group she was convicted of “running away” after fleeing a husband and mother-in-law who beat her: “I will try to become independent and divorce him. I hate the word husband…”

The justice system was stacked against women at every stage, with police arresting them solely on a complaint, prosecutors ignoring evidence that supported women’s assertions of innocence and judges often convicting them solely on the basis of “confessions” given in the absence of lawyers, the watchdog alleged.

The report referred to the 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women makes violence against women a criminal offense. But it said police, prosecutors and judges ignored evidence of abuse against the accused.

Roth commented: “Courts send women to prison for dubious crimes while the real criminals walk free. Even the most horrific abuses suffered by women seem to elicit nothing more than a shrug from prosecutors...”(Pajhwok)