Afghanistan’s new criminal regulation deepens repression of women and minorities.

Photo by Faruk Tokluoğlu on Pexels.com 

Women in Afghanistan are once again at the centre of institutionalised repression, as a new criminal regulation introduced by the Taliban intensifies restrictions over their lives while simultaneously targeting minority groups and dissenting voices.

The Criminal Procedure Regulation of the Courts, recently endorsed by Taliban leadership, has indeed been criticised as a deeply regressive framework. Rather than functioning as a neutral system of justice, it restructures the law around control, embedding discrimination at its core. 

For women, the regulation narrows the very definition of violence. By recognising domestic abuse only when it results in visible and severe physical injury or broken bones, it excludes the vast majority of harm experienced in private spaces. Psychological abuse, coercion, and sexual violence remain outside legal protection, effectively rendering them invisible. At the same time, the framework reinforces male authority within the household by allowing forms of “disciplinary” punishment, further blurring the line between legality and abuse.

This restrictive approach is compounded by provisions that criminalise women’s attempts to seek safety. Indeed, those who leave their homes to stay with relatives without their husband’s consent risk imprisonment, as do those who assist them. In a context where formal protection mechanisms have largely disappeared, these rules do more than regulate behaviour: they dismantle the last informal networks of refuge available to women.

The regulation’s impact goes beyond gender. Religious and social conformity is enforced through punishment, affecting those who do not follow the Taliban’s interpretation of Sunni Islam, including Shia, Ismaili, Sikh, and Hindu communities. Belief itself can become a criminal liability. Freedom of expression is also curtailed: acts previously deemed permissible can become punishable if later prohibited, criticism of Taliban policies or leaders is criminalised, and citizens are obliged to report “subversive” activities, creating an environment in which dissent is both surveilled and punished.

Violence is not only tolerated but codified. The expanded use of corporal punishment, particularly flogging, signals the normalisation of physical coercion, applied across a broad and loosely defined range of offences. Combined with a social hierarchy that varies punishments based on status, the regulation erodes equality before the law and disproportionately affects already marginalised groups.

This legal framework represents a sharp break from both international human rights standards and Afghanistan’s own legal tradition. For decades, Afghan criminal law, across monarchical, republican, and post-2001 periods, relied on principles such as legality, proportionality, and individual responsibility, drawing on Islamic jurisprudence and comparative legal systems. The 2026 regulation abandons these foundations in favour of a discretionary, hierarchical system that concentrates punitive power and weakens safeguards.

More than four years after returning to power, the Taliban have yet to establish a coherent legal system grounded in either widely recognised Islamic principles of justice, such as proportionality and due process, or modern human rights norms. Instead, they have imposed a decree-based order that systematically affects women and minorities, suppresses dissent, and reduces women to objects of control, perpetuating a pattern of gender-based persecution.

In response to this escalating legal repression, the international community is responding. Already in September 2024, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands had launched a joint initiative to hold Taliban authorities accountable for violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), potentially leading to proceedings before the International Court of Justice. The initiative frames Afghanistan’s situation as one of gender apartheid, a reality the new regulation only deepens. On their side, human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, have recently called for its immediate revocation or fundamental revision, warning that without decisive action, Afghanistan’s legal system risks becoming not a safeguard, but the most powerful instrument of repression.

written by Clara Pescatori