Institutionalising Gender Apartheid: Afghanistan’s New Penal Code

We’ve all witnessed the return of the Taliban rule since 2022 marked by a crackdown on women’s rights, denouncing and overturning advancements made on gender equality. Through gender-based persecution, imprisonment, enforced disappearances and the exclusion of millions of girls from education the Taliban has pursued a sustained campaign to erase women from public life. Most recently, in an extra codification of abuse,  the Taliban has enacted a new penal code that legalises domestic violence against women and girls. This allows husbands to ‘discipline their wives’ unless it results in serious injuries such as broken bones or open wounds. 

The Taliban’s new penal code, De Mahakumu Jazaai Osulnama, gives the Supreme Leader and Taliban judges full control over Afghanistan’s legal system. It criminalizes dissent and enforces strict social control, including corporal punishments. Women and girls are the hardest hit: husbands can legally beat their wives unless serious injury occurs, women need male guardians for travel and legal matters, and their rights to act independently are severely restricted. By turning discrimination and male authority into law, the code strips women of protections and makes justice almost impossible to access. 

Gender-based violence in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule is a deeply complex and multifaceted crisis. It is not only sponsored by state engineered ‘gender apartheid’ but enabled by the international community’s failure to uphold its commitment to Afghan women and girls.   

Womankind Worldwide strongly condemns this latest assault on human rights. The situation in Afghanistan remains one of the gravest violations of women’s rights in the world today. Having been systematically stripped off their right to participate socially, economically and politically in society, they’ve been reduced to second class citizens in their own country. 

We stand in unwavering solidarity with Afghan women’s movements and their courageous advocacy championing for the rights of women and girls. This includes their full and equal participation in public and political life. 

We call on the UK government and international allies to honour their obligations to women and girls in Afghanistan. This requires treating their safety and security as an urgent priority through sustained international aid, continued diplomatic pressure and the meaningful inclusion of Afghan women’s voices in all peace-building and reconstruction processes.   

• We call on the UK government and the international community, including the UN and other donors, to hold the Taliban accountable for women’s rights, tie aid to compliance, provide financial and technical support to Afghan women’s organizations to document abuses and provide legal aid, and ensure women are actively included in peacebuilding, reconstruction, and all policy decision-making. 

• We call on humanitarian and development actors to ensure all programs directly protect women and girls, provide accessible legal aid, maintain fully confidential reporting channels for abuse, and systematically monitor, document, and report violations to international human rights bodies to guarantee accountability. 

• We call on the Taliban/ the de facto authorities to amend the penal code to end legalised violence against women and ensure they can access justice, education, and basic rights without restriction. Afghan women and girls must be protected, not punished by law. 

Afghan women and girls cannot wait. The international community must act now, and the Taliban must be held responsible for codifying violence, discrimination, and fear into law.

On January 4, 2026, the Taliban released a new Criminal Procedure Code with 119 articles, 10 chapters and three sections signed by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada,