Janice Turner on the Taliban’s gender apartheid:

The Afghan men’s cricket team is one of 12 Test match sides. The limited-overs team competed in last year’s World Cup — with prestigious victories over Pakistan and England — and on Monday in India the Test side will play New Zealand. Why? The only possible answer is that the international community cares not a damn for Afghan women.

Why isn’t there a global boycott?

The Taliban is certainly thorough. First it stopped girls attending school and university, removed women from most jobs and demanded they cover themselves in chadors head to toe. Then it pondered other female pleasures, barring women from gyms, beauty salons, hairdressers and public parks, and making shopping trips, eating out, even buying a coffee illegal without a male chaperone. But a few chinks of happiness remained, so last month it banned the female voice from singing, reciting and speaking in public.

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Later this month, in the UAE, the Afghan men’s cricket team will play South Africa. A bitter irony. Throughout the apartheid years, sporting boycotts were used to pressure Pretoria to end violent white supremacist rule and to punish its bar on black cricketers. The world took a moral stand: we refused to fill stadiums with cheering fans for a racist state.

Without wishing to diminish that evil regime, the Taliban is a far more meticulous oppressor. Black children received an inferior education but could still attend school. Black people were barred from many jobs and received pitiful pay yet could still earn a living. Those corralled into black townships kept the most basic human freedoms: to play music and sport, to dance, sing, laugh and chat with friends, or simply feel the breeze in their hair.

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Campaigners are enraged to hear that female advances in every sphere of life, from law to sport, were a mere blip. They say the Taliban’s edicts are neither social “norms” nor Islamic law but mechanisms of social control (and of men, too, who are brutally punished for not keeping “wayward” womenfolk in check). What they endure needs a name and in October the UN legal committee will debate codifying a new crime against humanity into international law: gender apartheid. Existing laws address abuse of women but campaigners, from Nobel laureates to Amnesty, believe none fully capture the codified, systemic abuse of Afghan women.

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Like many women observing an unfolding dystopia that exceeds even the The Handmaid’s Tale, I’ve despaired that there is anything we can do for Afghan women. But there is: it starts with regarding their human rights as no more negotiable than those of black South Africans and treating the Taliban as what it is, the ruler of an apartheid state.

This has to happen.