Formerly the UN special envoy to Afghanistan, Kubis linked the rising violence against women in Afghanistan to flawed cultural practices, revealing the statistic of a 20 percent rise in female deaths and injuries last year. It is said that more than 300 women and girls were killed and more than 560 injured during 2012.

It was disclosed at the United Nations in New York ahead of a debate on Afghanistan by the UN Security Council on Tuesday. "Of course there are very clear attacks on women activists by the insurgency," he said. "Then there are unfortunate situations when indeed women are killed while doing their daily chores."

"Our role as the UN will be very crucial in the post-2014 period," Kubis said. "We will be one of the promoters, advocates of what should be practices in a country that will be perhaps more traditional and will be coming back to its roots."

The flawed cultural practices supported by high degree of illiteracy ratify intense violence against women, legitimate and justified. The culture deeming women as subordinate citizen multiplies their receptiveness to greater tendency of being subjected to ill-treatment. Apart from formal education, community based adult education and awareness campaigns on momentous right’s issues complementary to Islamic teachings might assuage the stringency of substandard customary law. The wretchedness does not end here as the incidents of violence against women remain largely under-reported because of cultural restraints, social norms and religious beliefs. Widespread discrimination and women's fears of social disgrace or threats to their lives discourage them from seeking to prosecute their offenders.

The presence of such barricades and widespread violence against women in post-Taliban democratic Afghanistan in confirmation to UN survey reports is appalling. Afghanistan enacted its Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law in August 2009. Since then it criminalizes child marriage, retribution, assault, marriage before the legal age, forced marriages, humiliation, intimidation, persecution, forced isolation, self-          immolation and more than a dozen other acts of violence and abuse against women.

Though a rising number of incidents of violence against women are being reported, and courts are issuing more convictions based on the law, but they represent only a fraction of the problem. Advances in using the law are welcomed; nevertheless progress in addressing violence against women will be limited until the law is applied more widely.

Afghan authorities are continuously called to take, much greater steps to both facilitate reporting of incidents of violence against women and launch immediate investigatory cells in districts and division level easing the prosecution. As long as women and girls in Afghanistan are subject to violence with impunity, little meaningful and sustainable progress for women’s rights can be achieved in the country. Ensuring rights for Afghan women – such as their participation in public life, including in the peace and reconciliation process and equal opportunities in education and employment – requires not only legal safeguards on paper, but critically, speedy and full enforcement of the EVAW law.