By Wazhma Frogh
As I write from Herat, Afghanistan, women and girls continue to endure what is arguably the most comprehensive system of gender-based oppression in the world today. Since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, more than one hundred decrees, directives, and policies have systematically dismantled women’s rights, freedoms, and legal protections. Girls have been excluded from secondary and higher education, women have been barred from most employment sectors, denied freedom of movement without male guardianship, excluded from public life, and subjected to increasingly restrictive morality regulations that govern every aspect of their existence.
From a human rights law perspective, these measures are not isolated violations; they constitute a deliberate and systematic attack against a civilian population on the basis of gender. Reports of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, intimidation, and punishment of women for alleged violations of Taliban decrees continue to emerge from across the country. The abolition of institutions designed to protect women, combined with legal measures that reinforce male guardianship and facilitate child and forced marriages, has left millions of Afghan women and girls without meaningful access to justice, protection, or remedy.
The Taliban’s treatment of women has generated growing calls for the recognition of gender apartheid as an international crime and for its incorporation into the framework of Crimes Against Humanity. Afghan women have become the driving force behind a global movement demanding that international law evolve to address systems of institutionalized gender domination that seek to erase an entire population from public life based solely on gender.
Yet international accountability continues to lag behind the scale and urgency of the violations. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) has sought arrest warrants against senior Taliban leaders for the crime against humanity of gender persecution, and while efforts under CEDAW may advance state responsibility proceedings before the ICC, justice remains elusive. The international community has amassed extensive evidence, documented widespread abuses, and issued repeated condemnations. What remains absent is the political will to translate legal commitments into meaningful accountability.
For Afghan women, this is no longer simply a human rights crisis; it is a test of international legal order. If a regime can systematically strip millions of women and girls of their most fundamental rights, institutionalize gender-based exclusion, and operate with near impunity, then the credibility of international human rights law itself is at stake. Afghan women are not asking for sympathy. They are demanding justice, accountability, and the recognition that gender persecution and gender apartheid are among the gravest violations of human dignity in our time.
Wazhma Frogh is a human rights lawyer and peacebuilding practitioner and is the founder of Women and Peace Studies Organization in Canada.
The views in this blog are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the WPSN-C or its membership.
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