Taliban Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan

Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Afghanistan has seen a sustained and expanding rollback of women’s and girls’ rights. Credible reporting and advocacy from the Council on Foreign Relations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others describe a system of institutionalized gender oppression that restricts education, employment, movement, dress, access to public space, and access to justice for roughly 20 million women and girls in Afghanistan. The Taliban have issued more than 80 decrees targeting women and girls, including bans on education beyond sixth grade, severe limits on paid work, and requirements that women be accompanied by a male guardian for travel and many public activities. Recent developments show continued tightening rather than relaxation of the restrictions. Reporting summarized in the provided sources notes that in 2024 the Taliban reinstated corporal punishment, including flogging and stoning, and adopted more comprehensive rules policing women’s visibility and movement. In January 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban leaders Hibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani over alleged crimes against humanity tied to the persecution of Afghan women and girls. The crisis remains concentrated across Afghanistan, with especially severe impacts in urban centers and provinces where women’s access to work, schooling, and aid has been most visibly curtailed. Humanitarian consequences are broad: women and girls face loss of education and livelihoods, reduced access to healthcare and justice, heightened risk of early marriage and coercion, and exclusion from public services and aid delivery. UN-linked advocacy and major human-rights groups continue to characterize the situation as gender apartheid and call for stronger legal and diplomatic responses, but no durable policy reversal is evident in the available recent reporting.