Good evening, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and appear before the Special Committee on Afghanistan this evening.
My name is Friba Rezayee. I was born and raised in Afghanistan. I was one of the first Afghan women to compete at the Olympic Games, in 2004 in Athens, and I am also the first Afghan woman Olympian to participate and compete in a combat sport. I am now the founder and executive director of Women Leaders of Tomorrow. We are a registered non-profit society in Vancouver, B.C. Our mandate is to empower women and girls through sports and education.
Following the return of the Taliban in August 2021, we have received countless messages from Afghan women and girls begging us to save their lives by helping them leave Afghanistan. Among them were—and still are—successful female athletes from the volleyball, cycling and judo teams. We were successful in assisting 148 Afghan women students to be evacuated to the United States, with the help of American humanitarian organizations.
However, the response from the Canadian government has been extremely disappointing. The IRCC's bureaucratic policies have made it impossible for Afghan female athletes to reach safety in Canada.
On November 25, 2021, I wrote a letter to the Right Honourable Prime Minister explaining the dire situation of our female athletes and describing the human rights violations now occurring in Afghanistan. The entire Canadian women's soccer team—gold medallists from Tokyo 2020—signed my letter.
The situation for female athletes is dire in Afghanistan. Members of our teams have been threatened by the Taliban with a punishment of 110 lashings in public or the death penalty. A female member of our volleyball team, Mahjabin Hakimi, was murdered under highly suspicious circumstances when the Taliban captured the capital.
The Taliban government forbids women in sports, as it is contrary to their strict interpretation of sharia law. They have suppressed all athletic participation of women in public. This was the Taliban's first decree. The Taliban is hunting from door to door and looking for women athletes and women who advocated for women's rights. If Canada does not evacuate them soon, they will die.
Canada played a vital role in Afghanistan by advancing women's and girls' empowerment and education. Afghans are devastated to see that our rights and freedoms were halted overnight. The Canadian government promised to evacuate women leaders, human rights defenders and women athletes. Thousands of Afghan families have been evacuated to Canada, but only 15 female athletes.
Many of our athletes are also students who want to pursue their higher education in Canada. These are the best and brightest young Afghans. Multilingual, educated and ambitious, they have overcome cultural and economic hardships—especially the women—to achieve ambitious goals. They have risked seizure, physical attacks and death to fight for equality, the right to an education and the rule of law, which Canadians take for granted here. They understand at a visceral level the fragility of democracy.
Women Leaders of Tomorrow has helped many Afghan women to obtain full-ride scholarships to Canadian universities, but their study permits and student visas have been denied by the IRCC on the grounds that they are unlikely to return to Afghanistan. Nine women engineers are completing their studies in Kazakhstan. They want to complete master's degrees at Canadian universities to qualify and work in their professions. Their non-renewable Kazakh visas will expire in August of this year. What will happen to them? They can't return home.
We call on the Canadian government to honour its long-standing promises to these Afghan women scholars, athletes and human rights defenders by actively assisting their entry into Canada and by instructing the IRCC to issue study permits to fully funded Afghan refugee students.
The U.S. Doha agreement represented—