New Taliban laws banning women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.

The Taliban last week published a set of new laws on “vice and virtue” approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must always cover their bodies – including their faces – with thick clothing in public so as not to lead men into temptation and vice.

Women’s voices are also seen as potential instruments of vice and are therefore no longer allowed to be heard in public under the new restrictions. Women are also no longer allowed to sing or read aloud, not even in their homes.

“If an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face and body,” the new laws state.

Men must also cover their bodies from the navel to the knees when outside their home.

In the future, Afghan women will also be forbidden to look directly at men who are not related to them by blood or marriage. And taxi drivers will be punished if they drive a woman without suitable male accompaniment.

Women or girls who do not comply may be arrested and punished in any manner deemed appropriate by Taliban officials tasked with enforcing the new laws.

Roza Otunbayeva, the UN special envoy for Afghanistan, condemned the restrictions, saying they represented an extension of the “intolerable restrictions” on the rights of women and girls that the Taliban had already imposed since they seized power in August 2021.

“It is a disturbing vision for Afghanistan’s future, where morality inspectors have discretion to threaten and arrest anyone based on a broad and sometimes vague list of violations,” she said in a statement on Sunday. “It extends the already intolerable restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and girls, with even the sound of a female voice outside the home apparently considered a moral violation.”

Speaking to Rukhshana Media, Mir Abdul Wahid Sadat, president of the Afghan Bar Association, said the new laws contradict Afghanistan’s national and international legal obligations.

“From a legal point of view, this document poses serious problems,” he said. “It contradicts the fundamental principles of Islam, in which the promotion of virtue has never been defined by force, coercion or tyranny.”

“This document violates not only the laws of Afghanistan, but also all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

“The Taliban government has no legitimacy whatsoever and these new decrees aimed at further eradicating and oppressing women are a sign of their misogyny,” said Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan human rights activist and the first vice president of the Afghan parliament.

“When they say women are not allowed to speak in public because they see women’s voices as a form of intimacy, it is incredibly frightening, and yet the whole world behaves as if this is normal. There is very little reaction or comment on what is happening, and the Taliban are emboldened by this indifference. They are not just targeting women, they are targeting all people. They must be held accountable.”

Shukria Barakzai, a former Afghan parliamentarian and Afghan ambassador to Norway, agreed that the international community’s silence on the Taliban’s oppression of 14 million Afghan women and girls has contributed to the criminalization of women’s bodies and voices.

“It is worrying that international organizations, particularly the United Nations and the European Union, instead of opposing these inhumane practices, are trying to normalize relations with the Taliban,” she said. “They are effectively whitewashing this group and ignoring the fact that the Taliban are committing widespread human rights violations.”

In the three years since seizing power from the US-backed government, the Taliban have imposed what human rights groups call “gender apartheid”: excluding women and girls from almost all areas of public life and denying them access to the justice system.

Even before the new “Vice and Virtue Laws,” women and girls were forbidden from attending secondary schools. They were practically not allowed to take on paid work, were not allowed to enter public parks, go to gyms or beauty salons, and had to adhere to a strict dress code.

Earlier this year, the Taliban also announced the reintroduction of public flogging and stoning of women for adultery.

The Taliban were asked for a statement.