TORONTO, Canada: Canada has announced that it will take in female Afghan judges and their families, who have been living as refugees, primarily in Greece, since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban last August.
The announcement was made by Canada’s immigration minister.
A group of 230 Afghanis, including judges and their families, will be resettled in Canada.
Also, as part of the group are an unspecified numbers of gay Afghans.
Canada earlier stated that it would resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees, though no timeline has been released. Following the Taliban taking over the country after the U.S. troop withdrawal in August, Canada has resettled 3,915 Afghans who had connections to the Canadian government, and another 2,535 on humanitarian grounds.
During the period without Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2021, Afghan women entered many fields once prohibited to them, including the judiciary, the media and politics.
“All the achievements of 20 years came back to zero within the blink of an eye,” said Freshta Masoni, a family court judge staying in Athens with her daughters, as quoted by Reuters.
In spite of earlier pledges to protect the rights of women, since coming back to power the Taliban have banned women and girls from attending school, working outside the home, and traveling without being accompanied by a male relative.
Meanwhile, international refugee organizations have been slow to begin the process of assisting the resettlement of those who fled Afghanistan.
“The biggest bottleneck is the issue that referral partners in the region have not been able to ramp up capacity,” Canada’s immigration minister, Sean Fraser, told Reuters. “These challenges are going to take a little bit of time to sort out.”
There have been calls to resettle the Afghan refugees without requiring a designation from the UNHCR or other NGOs, a step Canada has said it is willing to discuss.
