Madrid, December 12 (EFE). – Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares promised Afghan women this Friday that the current government will “never” recognize the Taliban regime and defended gender equality as something “essential” for building a solid democracy.
She also pledged to put Afghanistan’s “courageous” women and girls at the center of the 2026 Global Feminist Foreign Policy Conference in Madrid to advocate for justice and equality in the Asian country.
Opening the HearUs 2025 conference “Promoting Accountability for Women in Afghanistan,” Albares said today that what is happening in Afghanistan since the Taliban regained power in 2021 is the “most devastating” example of inequality.
But he warned that these setbacks on equality are happening elsewhere, and even in Spain there are reactionary ideas that “call into question” their rights.
According to the minister, Afghanistan has become a “true desert of rights,” with a population forced to flee, where criticism is persecuted, the economy is impoverished and where women are excluded “from public and all social life.”
Albares emphasized that the Taliban’s main aim is to deprive women and girls of “any future prospects” and that is why it is so important that they are seen and heard, because in his opinion “none of this is written in the history of Afghanistan”.
“No one will stop you,” Albares told the Afghan women present, assuring that these women “carry within them a torch of resistance that nothing can extinguish,” because it passes from hand to hand, crossing borders, creeds and differences, and that their struggle challenges everyone.
The minister also recalled the feminist commitment of the Spanish executive, made up of a left-wing coalition, and recalled that this week Spain’s first feminist cooperation strategy was published. The Foreign Action Strategy 2025-2028 puts gender equality at the heart of the State Department’s international work.
The Special Rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennet, in turn denounced a “drastic deterioration” of human rights in the country, concluded that human rights violations in the case of women were “crimes against humanity” and criticized the resignation of some powers, not Spain, on the situation.
The conference is organized at the Spanish Ministerial Headquarters in collaboration with the Women For Afghanistan organization. EFE
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