Afghan Taliban officials will attend a major UN climate conference starting next week, the Afghan Foreign Ministry said on Sunday, the first time since the former insurgents took power in 2021.
The COP29 climate summit in the Azerbaijan capital Baku will be one of the most high-profile multilateral events attended by Taliban administration officials since they took control of Kabul after fighting NATO-backed forces for 20 years.
The United Nations has not allowed the Taliban to take Afghanistan’s seat in the General Assembly, and the government of Afghanistan is not formally recognized by UN member states, largely because of the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s education and freedom of movement. There is a restriction.
Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Kahar Balkhi said officials from the National Environmental Protection Agency had arrived in Azerbaijan to participate in the COP conference. The Taliban took over the agency when they returned to power after US-led forces withdrew.
Taliban officials have attended UN-organized meetings on Afghanistan in Doha, and Taliban ministers have attended forums in China and Central Asia over the past two years.
But the COP bureau of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has postponed consideration of Afghanistan’s participation to 2021, leaving the country out of the talks.
Afghan NGOs have also struggled to participate in climate talks in recent years.
A diplomatic source familiar with the matter told Reuters that host Azerbaijan invited Afghan environment agency officials to COP29 as observers, allowing them to “potentially participate in perimeter discussions and potentially hold bilateral meetings “.
The source said, because the Taliban is not formally recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan within the UN system, officials cannot receive credentials from full member states to participate in the proceedings.
Azerbaijan’s president declined to comment.
The Taliban has almost closed schools and universities to female students above the age of 12. It also announced a set of sweeping morality laws this year, requiring women to cover their faces in public and restricting their travel outside the home without a male guardian. ,
The Taliban says it respects women’s rights according to its interpretation of Islamic law.
Afghanistan is considered one of the countries most affected by climate change. Flash floods have killed hundreds of people this year, and the heavily agriculture-dependent country has suffered one of its worst droughts in decades. Many subsistence farmers, who form the bulk of the population, face deepening food insecurity.
Some advocates have criticized the Taliban’s international isolation, saying that it only harms the Afghan people.
“Afghanistan is one of the countries that is really lagging behind its needs,” said Habib Mayar, deputy secretary-general of the G7+, an intergovernmental organization of countries affected by the conflict.
“It’s double the price they’re paying,” the mayor said. “There’s a lack of attention, a lack of connection with the international community, and then the humanitarian needs are increasing.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)