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By Richard Bennett
Afghanistan is experiencing a profound human rights crisis that has reshaped the lives of its people – especially women and girls. Systematically deprived of their rights to freedom of movement, education, work, healthcare, and freedom of expression, women and girls have been effectively erased from public life since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. These widespread and systematic deprivations form an institutionalized system of discrimination, oppression, and domination amounting to crimes against humanity.
Under Taliban policies of gender persecution, access to justice and protection has been severely compromised. Since seizing power, the Taliban has dismantled legal and institutional frameworks and abolished crucial protection mechanisms, while support networks have either collapsed or been forced underground. Infrastructure and institutional capacity that, albeit incomplete, once provided vital pathways for justice and protection, has been decimated.
The Taliban’s transformation of the legal and justice sectors is not a neutral restructuring – it actively weaponizes the legal, judicial, and social order to oppress women and girls, their allies, and LGBTQ+ persons, denying them their rights, dignity, safety, and agency. The result is the creation of a Taliban-controlled legal and justice system designed to enforce, entrench, and sustain the group’s repressive and misogynistic ideology. The effects in the short and long-term will be profound, felt not only by individuals, but in families, communities, and across generations.
Keywords: Gender persecution, Systematic discrimination, Erasure of women and girls, Taliban-controlled justice system, Crimes against humanity, Oppression and dismantled protections