A cat, or a squirrel for that matter, has more freedom than women in Afghanistan, Hollywood actress Meryl Streep said in a speech on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, imploring the international community to intervene.

       The remarks come after the Taliban unfurled in late August a new set of draconian laws that include bans on women reciting the Quran in public, looking at men who are not members of their family or going out in public without a face covering.

       “Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedoms than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park,” Streep said at the event focused on women’s rights in Afghanistan. “A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today, because the public parks have been closed to women and girls.”

       The Taliban, which took over the country after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, had previously introduced rules restricting women’s rights, such as a ban on women and girls attending school above the sixth grade. But the regime had not fully enforced them in urban areas and had portrayed the new regulations as temporary, The Washington Post previously reported.

       The morality police, which is operated by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, however, appears to have become more active, roaming bus stops and shopping centers, on the hunt for dress-code violations or women who might raise their voices in public.

       “The international community, as a whole, if it came together, could effect change in Afghanistan and stop the slow suffocation of … half the population,” Streep said.

       Taliban officials have tried to partly justify their new rules, saying they are designed to protect women. The regime has also been cracking down on men more recently, as morality police go knocking on the doors of men who have not showed up at mosques recently or checking for those who may have failed to grow a beard.

       Long before the Taliban came to power, Afghanistan granted women the right to vote in 1919, a year before the United States. It opened its first schools for girls in 1921. In 1950, the country abolished a system that had enforced strict gender segregation and veiling practices, according to Amnesty International.