15 August 2026 marks five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. In this time, the de facto authorities (DFA) have issued close to 100 edicts, decrees and directives restricting nearly every aspect of women’s and girls’ lives, from their voices being banned in public to extremely limited education and work opportunities, no minimum age for marriage and a justice system controlled by the Taliban.
This did not happen to a country with no history of protecting women. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghanistan built a legal framework that, however imperfectly applied, moved in the right direction. The 2004 Constitution guaranteed equality between men and women. The 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW law) criminalised 22 distinct forms of violence, including child and forced marriage, rape, beating, denial of the right to education, work and access to health services, and baad (giving away a woman or girl to settle a dispute). The 2019 Law on the Protection of Child Rights defined a child, for the first time in Afghan law, as anyone under 18. Marriage among girls under 18 fell from 46% in 1998 to 29% by 2023.
None of that legal framework exists any longer. Five years on, we trace what has actually happened, and what it means for Afghan women and girls.
Tracing violations
- The institutions built to protect women are gone: In September 2021, within a month of taking power, the Taliban replaced the Ministry of Women’s Affairs with the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. In May 2022, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the body responsible for investigating rights violations, was dissolved by administrative decree on the basis that the DFA considered it “unnecessary.” Specialised courts and prosecution units that had enforced the EVAW law were disbanded, and family courts were folded into ordinary civil courts. Women’s shelters were also closed. A woman experiencing violence or discrimination today has no institution left whose job it is to investigate her complaint, prosecute it, or shelter her while it is resolved.
- Women and girls are locked out of education and work: Girls were barred from secondary school within weeks of the takeover, and from university altogether by December 2022. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls are barred from secondary and tertiary education. Women civil servants were instructed not to attend their workplaces in November 2021; by January 2026, the DFA had removed them from the payroll entirely, with some women learning of their dismissal only when a salary payment failed to arrive. Women have also been barred from working for NGOs, since December 2022, and for the UN, since April 2023. Nearly 80% of young Afghan women are now not in education, employment or training, compared with 20% of young men.
- Justice system rebuilt to exclude women: All judges appointed under the previous government, including approximately 270 women, have been dismissed. They have been replaced exclusively by Taliban-affiliated men who lack legal training and pass judgements according to Taliban-issued edicts rather than established legal principles. There are no women judges, prosecutors, or officially registered lawyers left in the country. Reaching a court at all requires a mahram (male chaperone related to a woman), who is frequently the very person a woman is seeking protection from.
- Women and girls confined to the home: Women have been barred from parks and amusement parks without a mahram, from travelling more than 72 kilometres without one, and from driving altogether. By 2022, public parks, gyms and baths were closed to women entirely. In 2024 UN consultations, around 8 in 10 Afghan women reported being denied access to public space in the previous year, even when accompanied by a mahram, and roughly 7 in 10 said they felt unsafe going outside alone. The space available to a woman in Afghanistan has narrowed to her home, and even that is not guaranteed to be safe.
- The “Morality Law”: A hijab instruction requiring women to fully cover their faces and bodies was issued in May 2022, and formally codified in the Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in August 2024 (the “Morality Law”). The law classifies a woman’s voice as awrah (something to be concealed and not heard in public) and is backed by more than 3,300 morality inspectors. Further Taliban-issued directives specify that a woman’s covering must show no part of her body, carry no adornment, and carry no fragrance.
- The return of corporal punishment: Public flogging resumed under the Taliban’s extremist interpretation of Shariah, with the first official floggings of women recorded in November 2022. In 2025, Afghanistan’s de facto Supreme Court announced public “floggings” of at least 170 women. Women are disproportionately prosecuted for so-called “moral” crimes such as adultery and “illicit relationships”. Women fleeing forced marriage, domestic violence, or rape are frequently mischaracterised as having committed adultery on this basis.
- Right to health is denied: Women have been barred from studying medicine, midwifery, nursing, radiology and dentistry since December 2024, closing off the pipeline of female health workers that Afghan women depend on, given that prevailing norms require treatment by a female provider in most of the country. The effects of these policies are already being seen: in 2025, one of the major barriers in accessing healthcare was the lack of female staff. These restrictions do not simply limit access to care: the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan has found them to be deliberate policy choices that cannot be justified by resource constraints or cultural considerations.
- No minimum age for marriage: In May 2026, the de facto Ministry of Justice published Decree No. 18, the “Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses.” It regulates how a marriage may be dissolved, without ever setting a floor for when one may begin. A girl who has reached puberty, however young, forfeits her right to challenge a marriage arranged by her father or grandfather simply through silence. It follows Decree No. 12, issued four months earlier, which set the penalty for a husband’s violent assault on his wife at 15 days’ imprisonment, regardless of her age. Already, in northern Afghanistan, families have reportedly sold daughters as young as two months old to settle debts or secure food, pledging to hand each girl over to her intended husband once she reaches seven to nine years old. Taken together, a girl, even younger than ten years old, now has no legal floor protecting her from marriage, and almost no realistic route to leave one that harms her.
- Women and girls bear the brunt of a deepening humanitarian crisis: Afghanistan is in the grip of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Almost 22 million people, 45% of the population, need aid to survive. Deteriorating health outcomes, food insecurity, and shrinking access to services delivered by female professionals are deepening the crisis. Female-headed households are hit hardest: 88% are unable to meet their basic needs, compared with 74% of male-headed households, as bans on women’s work strip families of income and push them towards precarious, informal labour.
What Afghanistan owes to its women and girls
The restrictions traced above do not operate in isolation; they compound. Each restriction feeds the next one, and none has been reversed in five years.
Every restriction traced above is also a breach of a right Afghanistan agreed to protect. Afghanistan remains a party to seven of the nine core international human rights treaties, including the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). That obligation did not lapse with a change in authority, and it requires more than simply avoiding violating rights, but actively dismantling the laws, structures and stereotypes that produce discrimination and promote inequality and even violence in the first place.
The cost of failing to do so is measurable: Afghanistan’s GDP will shrink by two-thirds by 2066 if the ban on women’s higher education continues, a decline driven by nothing other than the exclusion of half the population from the economy. Poverty and displacement compound the harm further; as subsistence insecurity deepens and returnee numbers grow, families have fewer alternatives, and child marriage becomes more likely.
In December 2025, the Peoples’ Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan concluded that the Taliban’s “sustained and deliberate campaign of gender-based persecution, carried out through edicts, institutional decrees, and systemic violence” constitutes crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan has found that the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls amounts to the crime against humanity of persecution on grounds of gender, and has backed the growing international characterisation of the situation as gender apartheid. The CEDAW Committee, reviewing Afghanistan’s record in July 2025, called it “an unprecedented crisis and one of the most severe reversals of women’s human rights ever recorded.”
At Equality Now, we believe legal equality is the foundation everything else is built on. Where laws discriminate (whether codified, religious, or customary), violence and exclusion become almost inevitable. The Taliban regime today defines women and girls as legally subordinate, and gender equality cannot be achieved without the legal protection and full realisation of women’s and girls’ rights to autonomy, dignity, and bodily integrity. We support the call for full accountability for the egregious violation of women’s and girls’ rights by the Taliban; including from crimes against humanity. We call on all States to deploy every available international legal mechanism to hold Afghanistan accountable for the systematic and widespread suppression of the rights of women and girls. States should treat the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan as a critical priority in all international actions, including joining joint actions in international courts; as well as make engagement with the Taliban conditional on upholding the fundamental human rights of women and girls. Any advocacy and reform efforts must centre the voices of Afghans, especially women and girls, in decision making. Reparations and restoration of essential services must be a key priority. Five years on, that protection is long overdue.
Read more about Equality Now’s work to end child marriage in Afghanistan in our report, Exploring the interlinkages between child marriage and family laws in South Asia.
