Though this issue won’t appear for another 3-4 weeks, given the painful events unravelling in Afghanistan, it would feel banal to the point of negligence to fail to ask ‘where are we going’ in terms of global human rights. Many years ago, I took a short course on ‘primary health care in low and middle countries’ to equip myself with some knowledge of the public health issues I was likely to encounter first in Sudan and later Afghanistan. Though the teaching was a little too ‘touchy feely’ for my taste, it left an impression based on one talk and one message: female literacy. Once assimilated, I realised that this was central to everything I was based close to Kabul, during the immediate, relatively upbeat (if not as openly urbane as the 1970s) post-Soviet withdrawal era and have maintained some contact in the form of research collaborations with colleagues in the Afghan Ministry of Health. In parallel, we have seen the tantalising promise of a future of freedom and children’s futures and women’s rights snatched away so abruptly, the purple period from 2001 to 2021 already feeling …

中文翻译：

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本期亮点

尽管这个问题在另外 3-4 周内不会出现，但鉴于阿富汗正在发生的痛苦事件，如果不问全球人权问题“我们要去哪里”，就会让人感到平庸到疏忽大意。许多年前，我参加了一个关于“中低端国家的初级卫生保健”的短期课程，以使自己掌握一些我可能首先在苏丹和后来在阿富汗遇到的公共卫生问题的知识。虽然教学对我的口味来说有点太“敏感”，但它留下的印象基于一个谈话和一个信息：女性识字。一旦被同化，我意识到这是我在喀布尔附近的一切的核心，在此期间，相对乐观（如果不像 1970 年代那样公开文雅）后苏联退出时代，并以与阿富汗卫生部同事的研究合作形式保持了一些联系。与此同时，我们看到自由未来的诱人承诺、儿童的未来和妇女的权利被如此突然地夺走，从 2001 年到 2021 年的紫色时期已经让人感到……