Meryl Streep: Afghan women have fewer rights than cats, birds

Hollywood actress Meryl Streep criticized the Taliban and the severe restrictions posed on women’s rights in Afghanistan since its takeover in 2021, urging the international community to do more.

Streep, at an event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, said that a “cat has more freedom” than a woman in Kabul.

“Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedoms than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park,” Streep said.

“A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today, because the public parks have been closed to women and girls,” she added.

Streep said it’s “extraordinary” that a bird may sing in Kabul, but girls and women cannot do so in public.

Her comments come a month after a new Taliban edict was passed banning women in Afghanistan from baring their faces and speaking in public places.

Afghan women now also face restrictions on their movements without a male relative, and are required to cover their bodies and faces with a thick, heavy cloth while in public. Secondary school for girls is nonexistent, and more and more of their freedoms have eroded.

Many in the international community have criticized these harsh new laws, calling what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan “gender apartheid.”

Streep stressed that the international community could effect change in Afghanistan for women.

“The international community, as a whole, if it came together, could effect change in Afghanistan and stop the slow suffocation of.. half the population who are incarcerated,” she said.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez, who was also at the event, said that Afghanistan will never take its rightful place on the global stage “without educated women, without women in employment, including in leadership roles, and without recognizing the rights and freedoms of one-half of its population.”