KABUL - A landmark law aiming to protect Afghan women's rights by criminalizing acts like child marriage and rape is only being used to prosecute a small number of cases, the United Nations said Wednesday.
The Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law was enacted in 2009 but Afghan courts have turned to it for just over 100 cases, often relying instead on Islamic Sharia law, it added.

The report from the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights highlighted serious and lingering women's rights problems 10 years after the Taliban were toppled by a US-led invasion.

For the first time in Afghanistan, the 2009 law criminalized acts of violence against women, including forced prostitution, inciting a woman to commit self-immolation and giving away women and girls to settle disputes.

While noting that most incidents of violence against women go unreported, the study said there were 2,299 registered violent incidents against women in the year from March 2010 to March 2011.
Indictments were filed in only seven percent or 155 of these cases, while courts used the EVAW law as the basis of judgments in only four percent of the total incidents — 101 cases.

"As long as women and girls are subject to violence with impunity that violates their human rights, little meaningful and sustainable progress for women's rights can be achieved in Afghanistan," said Georgette Gagnon, UNAMA's director of human rights.

"Ensuring rights for Afghan women... requires not only legal safeguards on paper but speedy and full enforcement of the EVAW law."

The United Nations is recommending that the Afghan government take a string of steps to address the situation, such as training police, prosecutors and judges on how to apply the law.

While experts say there have been clear gains for women's rights over the past 10 years in Afghanistan, notably in education, practices such as honor killings and child marriage are still relatively common.

Many legal cases in Afghanistan are resolved in the informal sector, where cases are arbitrated by local elders based on Islamic and tribal traditions and are often resolved through restorative justice.
The Taliban also continue to operate courts in areas that they control and influence. (AFP)