Malala Fund's statement on the Taliban’s new criminal code.
The Taliban’s newly issued Criminal Procedure Code marks a further escalation in the systematic repression of women and girls in Afghanistan.
Together with the Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, this code entrenches a legal system designed to control, punish and exclude women and girls from public life. It authorises physical punishment, weakens due process and empowers officials and private individuals to enforce obedience. Women’s movement, expression and autonomy are further criminalised, while accountability for violence against women is weakened and the code effectively legitimises abuse. This is gender apartheid. These laws codify a system of domination that denies women and girls their most basic rights, including education, safety, freedom of movement and participation in public life.
“A country cannot progress when policies and institutions lock women and girls out of public life and rip away their basic freedoms. I stand with every Afghan girl who refuses to be silenced — learning in secret and expressing herself however she can. We must come together to reject gender apartheid. Leaders must urgently step up: stand with the people of Afghanistan and hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes,” said Malala Yousafzai, co-founder of Malala Fund.
“The Taliban are the outcome of years of international decisions that traded away the rights and agency of Afghan women and girls. Their legal system reflects those failures, not the will of Afghan society and not an inevitable cultural reality. This criminal code makes clear that their governance is not transitional. It is a deliberate system built on control, exclusion, subordination and legalised violence,” said Sahar Halaimzai, senior director of policy and advocacy at Malala Fund.
The harm does not stop with women and girls. A society that legalises violence, normalises surveillance and strips half its population of dignity and opportunity is a society that cannot thrive. Families are destabilised, social trust erodes and economic and cultural life is hollowed out. Everyone pays the price when women and girls are treated as subjects rather than citizens.
“This criminal code clearly codifies gender apartheid in Afghanistan. The Taliban have made it very clear that women and girls, and even men, are treated as slaves. They have now gone a step further: beyond enforcing oppression in practice, they have formally recognised and legalised slavery and it is so horrible,” said Zahra Joya, founder of Rukhshana Media.
“The code makes even clearer that gender apartheid manifests across society as a whole. It is not solely about women but about sustaining the regime at the cost of everyone and everything — rights, dignity, social cohesion and the future itself,” concluded Metra Mehran, advisor to the End Gender Apartheid campaign.
These measures should be treated as evidence of serious human rights violations and gender apartheid. Engagement with the Taliban that ignores or downplays this legal architecture risks legitimising repression and emboldening abuses globally.
This regulation formalises practices already documented by the Afghanistan Justice Archive, including repeated Supreme Court-approved sentences of public flogging against women for so-called “moral crimes”.