UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned Wednesday that worsening repression, poverty and forced returns were deepening Afghanistan’s crisis, criticizing the international community for abandoning the Afghan people at a time when humanitarian funding for the country has sharply declined.

Calling on governments to put the lives of citizens first and pressure the Taliban into complying with the country’s international obligations, he stated:

There is a deafening global silence about the people of Afghanistan. The de facto authorities are tightening and enforcing oppressive measures, especially against women and girls. We need renewed efforts to protect the rights of all Afghans.

He said that shrinking foreign assistance was compounding hardship for the estimated 21.9 million people who are in dire need of humanitarian aid. The UN recorded at least 449 men and women being subjected to corporal punishment during the first half of 2026, alongside continuing arrests over clothing, beard length and music. Additionally, journalists, religious minorities and the Taliban’s former adversaries also continued to face abuses.

More than two million girls and women have been denied secondary and higher education since 2021. Türk further commented that the decrees issued this year further obstruct women seeking separation from their husbands and explicitly authorizes child marriage and domestic violence, describing the systematic exclusion of women as a “gender apartheid”. The Taliban’s recent unveiling of the Criminal Procedural Regulations for Courts was criticized by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) for not adhering to the core guarantees enumerated under the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam which safeguards the right to human dignity and equal protection under the law.

He also criticized forced returns from Iran, Pakistan and other countries, warning that some deportees had never visited Afghanistan and would face deep poverty and inadequate food, clean water, healthcare, education and employment.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in July 2025 for Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani over alleged persecution on gender grounds.  In a separate December 2025 investigation, Amnesty reported that Iran and Pakistan had expelled more than 2.6 million Afghans that year, approximately 60 per cent of them comprising of women and children.

The organization urged states to halt forced returns, citing non-refoulement, which prohibits returning people to places where they face a real risk of grave human rights violations.  Furthermore, the Permanent People’s Tribunal for Women of Afghanistan in the same month ruled that the Taliban de facto authorities had committed crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute, and violated Afghanistan’s binding obligations under international human rights treaties. 

The Taliban took over Afghanistan twice in modern history, the first being in September 1996 and the most recent incident which was in 2021.