The Taliban’s systematic use of Afghanistan’s legal and judicial system to target women and girls amounts to “crimes against humanity,” a United Nations human rights expert said in a report circulated Wednesday.
Richard Bennett, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, told the General Assembly that the Taliban have “weaponized” the law to oppress women since retaking power in 2021. The expert reported that the current government has dismantled key legal protections, dismissed hundreds of judges—including approximately 270 women—and installed men aligned with their hardline ideology, many of whom lack formal legal training.
“Today, there are no women judges or prosecutors and no officially registered female lawyers, leaving women and girls with fewer safe channels to report abuse or seek redress,” Bennett said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) echoed these concerns earlier this week, suggesting that the four years of returned Taliban control have served as a “grim reminder of the gravity of the Taliban’s abuses.” HRW warned that the “Law on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice” severely curtails women’s autonomy and claimed the regime’s policies contribute to an escalating humanitarian crisis exacerbated by forced returns of Afghan refugees from countries like Iran and Pakistan.
The emotional and physical toll of the Taliban’s policies is powerfully illustrated in the “Voices of Afghanistan” interview series by JURIST, where a former family court director described being denied not only her career but even the most basic freedoms.
She recounted how, after years of working to uphold women’s rights in court, she is now effectively confined to her home. After losing her job and income, she suffered the deaths of two children and serious health problems, yet even visiting a park for relief was forbidden. “Imagine a woman who has been studying and then working all her life… now denied even what nature grants to every blade of grass—the right to fresh air.”
Despite growing evidence of systemic abuses, both Bennett and HRW criticized the lack of a strong international response. “UN member countries have for four years failed to take effective action to end the egregious rights violations occurring in Afghanistan,” HRW said.
The anonymous interviewee from the JURIST series pleaded for a stronger international response to the nation’s humanitarian backsliding:
I wish I could speak English and shout for the whole world to hear. I am tired of the world—of its people, of its ignorance, of its indifference, of its disloyalty, of its lack of sympathy. I am tired of the international community’s indifference toward the world’s most suffering women in Afghanistan.
