Kabul - (AFP) - The Taliban authorities on Tuesday rejected the United Nations accusation of violating women's right to work in Afghanistan, stressing that thousands of them work in the country's public sector.

But director of personnel at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs Sharafeddin Sharaf told AFP that many women receive their salaries even though they do not go to work because the offices are not set up for proper gender segregation.

He said, "Mixing in one office is not possible in our Islamic system." His remarks came a day after a UN human rights expert announced a "significant decline" in women's rights since the Taliban returned to power in August last year.

He was unable to specify the number of working women, but confirmed that "none of the female employees were dismissed."

However, many women went out in demonstrations to protest the loss of their jobs and to demand the right to work, and the Taliban authorities broke up some of those demonstrations by force.

Sharaf said that some women go to work "once a week to their offices to sign the attendance sheet and their salaries are paid at home."

This happens in places where "arrangements for segregation of the sexes have not been completed," adding that women work in the ministries of health, education and interior, where they are needed.

Sharaf said it was up to the all-male Taliban leadership to decide "when women can come to the offices they don't go to at the moment."

His remarks came after the announcement of a UN expert in the field of human rights that women's freedoms have declined significantly since the return of the Taliban to power.

"There is no country in the world where women and girls are so quickly deprived of their basic human rights solely because of their gender," Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan Richard Bennett said in Geneva.

A spokesman for the Taliban government, Zabihullah Mujahid, said Bennett's report was biased.

"There is no danger to the lives of women in Afghanistan today, or no one insults Afghan women," he said in a statement late Monday, adding that they were still enrolled in public and private universities.

However, most secondary schools across the country have been ordered to close, which means that the current generation of female undergraduates may be the last.

Many Taliban officials say the ban is temporary but also give a range of excuses for the closure, from a lack of funds to a lack of time to reformulate the school curriculum according to Islamic standards.

Local media on Monday quoted the education minister as saying it was a matter of tradition because a large number of rural people did not want their daughters to go to school.

Since returning to power, the Taliban have imposed severe restrictions on girls and women to comply with their strict interpretation of Islam, effectively cutting them off from public life.

The movement quickly closed down the Ministry of Women's Affairs and replaced it with the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The hardline Islamist movement has ordered women to wear headscarves outside, preferably the burqa.