England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chief Richard Gould has written to his Worldwide Cricket Council (ICC) counterpart urging the game’s international governing physique to think about taking motion in opposition to the Afghanistan Cricket Board over the Taliban authorities’s remedy of girls.
Earlier this week, a bunch of greater than 160 politicians, together with Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Lord Kinnock, signed a letter encouraging England to boycott subsequent month’s Champions Trophy match in opposition to Afghanistan and take a stand in opposition to the Taliban regime’s assault on ladies’s rights.
In the meantime, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer known as for the ICC to “deliver their own rules”, with the Tradition Secretary Lisa Nandy saying the match “should go ahead” as to not penalise the England staff, however prompt that British dignitaries ought to snub the occasion.
“What is taking place in Afghanistan is the worst violation of women’s rights anywhere on earth,” Gould wrote.
“The ECB has maintained its position of not scheduling any bilateral cricket matches against Afghanistan. We had hoped, when voicing this concern two years it would drive the debate to further action, but unfortunately, this has not been seen.
“While many of our domestic stakeholders continue to call for a boycott of our fixture in the Champions Trophy, a coordinated, ICC-led approach would be significantly more impactful than unilateral actions by individual members.
“We need to work with you and different members to discover a answer that gives hope that the rights of girls and women in Afghanistan might be restored.”
Gould additionally urged the ICC to urgently take into account “placing an immediate condition on the membership status of the Afghanistan Cricket Board to deliver women’s cricket by a certain deadline” and to ringfence a “meaningful proportion” of the ACB’s funding till the ladies’s recreation is reinstated.
Feminine participation in sport has successfully been outlawed because the Taliban’s return to energy in 2021, a transfer that places the ACB in direct contravention of the principles of cricket’s governing physique.
The ladies’s cricket staff fled the nation, searching for refuge in Pakistan earlier than they had been granted emergency visas for Australia, the place most of them at present reside.
Underneath Taliban rule, funds to the ladies’s facet had been minimize off and the staff has obtained no communication from cricket chiefs regardless of a number of makes an attempt at making contact.
Afghanistan’s feminine athletes had their properties raided by the Taliban and a few of them had been compelled to burn their kits
Gould has additionally known as on the ICC to help the exiled ladies’s staff “through funding and advocacy to allow them to compete as an Afghanistan Refugee team,” a mannequin which was adopted by the Worldwide Olympic Committee for the 2024 Paris Video games.
In 2021, the ICC established an Afghanistan Working Group to assist affect change and monitor the state of affairs within the nation.
Nevertheless, the complete board was all-male and following a gathering in 2023, the cricket chiefs considerably raised Afghanistan’s price range while offering no replace on the ladies’s staff.
One other situation Gould outlined in his letter was to: “Reform the existing Afghanistan Working Group to monitor and oversee this work, by providing regular and objective assessment of the progress of the Afghanistan Cricket Board.
“This group may search the views of specialists on this subject, to upskill and empower leaders to make knowledgeable and supported choices.
“If we do not take the actions that are within our power to take – whilst recognising that much is not in our power – we are all complicit and have failed the privilege that comes with holding a global leadership position in our sport.”
