JURIST EXCLUSIVE – Law students and lawyers in Afghanistan report to JURIST on the situation there after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Here a lawyer in Kabul offers his observations and perspectives on the recent Taliban restrictions on music in public places. For data protection and security reasons, we withhold the name and institutional affiliation of our correspondent. The text has only been slightly edited to respect the author’s voice.
The Taliban have banned live music in hotels. Officials from the Ministry of Virtue Propaganda and Vice Prevention – established by the Taliban after Afghanistan came to power – met with most of the hotel owners in Kabul on Wednesday.
At that meeting, the Taliban instructed hotel owners to avoid live music and to separate the places of men and women in the hotels. They have done that in some other provinces as well. In Takhar, they even beat up a groom for bringing live music to his wedding ceremony.
In Afghanistan, hotels and restaurants are subject to the specific laws and regulations of the Ministry of Information and Culture. They get licenses from this ministry and the government uses this ministry to communicate with them. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – as you understand from its name – will now establish guidelines for each individual government agency through which they will tell people what is right and what is wrong.
In the past women and men were only separated by a partition made of plastic or other stuff, now they have made it clear that hotel owners have to separate them with walls. This suggests that they are still of the opinion that music should be banned in the country. In fact, I think this is a starting point for them to slowly ban music. In other statements, one of the top Taliban leaders has told the media that he will give them AFN 40,000 a month if singers stop singing. These statements are clearly a sign that there will be no musicians in the country and those who want to stay have to change their profession and look for another source of income.
