Taliban Codifies Slavery and Abuse of Women as World Debates Normalization

The Taliban has quietly enacted a sweeping criminal code that explicitly legalizes slavery and authorizes husbands to beat their wives, embedding what legal experts describe as systematic violence into Afghan law. The 119-article Criminal Procedure Code, signed by Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada on January 7, 2026, formally divides Afghan society into “free persons and slaves,” marking the return of a status absolutely prohibited under international law.“The Taliban has now approved the return of slavery in Afghanistan,” Senator Jim Risch, chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote on social media.The code categorizes Afghan society into four rigid classes — religious scholars, elites, middle class, and lower class — with different penalties for identical crimes based on social status. Under Article 15, discretionary punishment applies “whether the offender is free or a slave.” Article 4 explicitly authorizes husbands and masters to carry out corporal punishment against wives and slaves without judicial oversight. Under Article 32, husbands can legally beat their wives with impunity unless the violence results in broken bones or visible bruising; only then does the husband face fifteen days’ imprisonment. By contrast, under Article 70, those who cause animals to fight receive five months imprisonment, meaning the code prescribes harsher penalties for animal abuse than for most domestic violence against women.The new code arrived six months after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in July for Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani for gender-based persecution—an unprecedented acknowledgment that yielded no deterrent effect.From Morality to Codified ViolenceBeyond legalizing violence against women, the code transforms Afghanistan into a surveillance state where dissent itself is criminal.Insulting Taliban leaders carries 20 lashes and six months’ imprisonment. Criticizing any policy the supreme leader endorses, including the ban on women’s education, is a punishable offense. Citizens are granted the legal right to personally punish anyone they witness committing what they deem a “sin,” effectively deputizing the population as moral enforcers.Religious scholars receive complete immunity from criminal prosecution regardless of the offense. The code designates followers of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence as Muslims while characterizing other sects, including Shias, Ismailis, Sikhs, and Hindus, as “heretics,” creating legal grounds for systematic persecution of religious minorities.The January 2026 code builds upon more than 150 edicts systematically stripping Afghan women of fundamental rights since August 2021. The morality law, formalized in August 2024, declares a woman’s voice as intimate as her private parts, prohibiting women from singing or speaking loudly in public.“It’s just so weird and self-defeating on some levels,” Edmund Fitton-Brown, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former United Nations coordinator responsible for sanctions on the Taliban, tells The New York Sun. “They claim that they want some kind of relationship with the outside world, but they’re behaving in a way that is soundly alienating to really everyone who deals with them.”Mr. Fitton-Brown describes supreme leader Akhundzada as “an absolute head banger, just a Neanderthal, extreme medievalist Islamist.” The Taliban leadership, he explains, “always seems to default to the more extreme interpretation, to the less rational interpretation. That’s some idea that they have of purity.”Price of World SilenceThe arrest warrants illuminate a troubling contradiction. While the International Criminal Court found reasonable grounds to believe the Taliban leadership committed persecution since August 2021, Russia recognized the Taliban government in July 2025. China accepted diplomatic credentials from a Taliban envoy in January 2024, followed by the United Arab Emirates in August. More than 40 countries now maintain diplomatic relationships with the regime.Uzbekistan has also signed a 2.5-billion-dollar trade deal with the Taliban covering energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing. Such arrangements proceed despite International Criminal Court findings and the code’s formalization of slavery.“But I think even the Russians and Chinese look at this and say, this is nuts,” says Mr. Fitton-Brown. “But we’re not necessarily going to make a huge fuss about it.”The UN convened talks in Doha in June 2024, bringing Taliban officials and representatives from approximately 30 countries together to discuss Afghanistan’s integration into the international community. To secure Taliban attendance, the UN crafted an agenda that excluded human rights issues and barred Afghan women from main meetings, violating UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women’s participation in peace and security.This may, in hindsight, have marked the beginning of the downward spiral with no accountability. “Within weeks of the Doha meeting, the Taliban formalized its comprehensive morality law,” Mr. Fitton-Brown notes.Human Rights Watch described the UN’s decision to exclude women as “shocking” and accused the organization of “abandoning its duty to uphold human rights and women’s participation in a shameful effort to appease the Taliban.” Former chairperson of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Sima Samar, warned that “by accepting the Taliban’s conditions for participation in the talks, the UN is undermining its commitment to promoting inclusivity and gender equality.”The August 2024 morality law that followed the Doha talks declared women’s voices as intimate as their private parts, prohibiting women from singing, reading aloud, or speaking loudly in public, codifying restrictions that activists had warned the UN’s accommodation would embolden.International ResponseThe International Criminal Court has since found reasonable grounds to believe Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, Taliban chief justice who served in the same role during the Taliban’s 1996 to 2001 rule and ran a madrassa in Quetta, Pakistan, ordered persecution on gender and political grounds. Enforcement, however, presents challenges. The ICC has no police force and depends on member states to carry out arrests. Afghanistan is party to the Rome Statute, yet with the Taliban controlling the country, detention would require leaders to travel to the 124 states willing to enforce warrants.The Taliban rejected the warrants as “baseless rhetoric,” characterizing them as an attack on “the sacred laws of Islamic Sharia.” Multiple countries, including Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands, announced in September 2024 their intention to take Afghanistan to the International Court of Justice for violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.The ICJ case, the first time one country has taken another to the court specifically for gender discrimination, follows a six-month negotiation period before formal proceedings. While the court cannot enforce rulings directly, a judgment against the Taliban could lead to additional sanctions and political pressure. However, cases typically take years to conclude, and the process risks conferring legitimacy on the Taliban even as it holds them accountable. As one Afghan lawyer noted, the initiative represents “a valuable and important effort, provided it does not result in the recognition of the Taliban.”The Measured CostMeanwhile, UN data shows that excluding women from employment has cost Afghanistan one billion dollars annually. The restrictions have increased women’s economic dependence, contributing to deteriorating mental health and domestic violence. Survey data found 75 percent of Afghan women interviewed described their mental health as poor or very poor.Healthcare workers revealed the Taliban has quietly restricted women’s access to contraception, with supplies nearly exhausted. Doctors report Taliban threats if they administer birth control. Eighty-five percent of Afghans live on less than one dollar daily, and only 6 percent of women work. Until December 2024, women could study nursing and midwifery — the only fields permitted after universities banned them. Mr. Akhundzada ordered these programs closed; effectively eliminating the final pathway to healthcare work, despite Afghanistan needing 18,000 additional midwives and losing a woman every two hours to birth complications.Afghanistan also saw a sharp increase in women attempting suicide after the Taliban takeover. Reports document cases like Marina Sadat, a 23-year-old midwifery student detained by morality police in December 2023 while traveling to the Farabi Institute of Health Sciences. Twenty-two days later, her body was found in a sack in a canal in Kabul’s Paghman district. Those familiar with the case said she had been sexually abused. When her parents sought justice from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, guards refused them entry and threatened them not to return.The Question of LeverageThe prospects for international pressure are uncertain.“The United States does care to some degree,” observes Mr. Fitton-Brown. “Probably you might get more of a sort of body of sound and outrage in Europe.” He attributes American restraint to the bipartisan association of Afghanistan with failure and suggests one pressure point lies within the Taliban itself. According to Mr. Fitton-Brown, while Mr. Akhundzada remains unmoved in his southern stronghold of Kandahar, other Taliban factions recognize that their governing challenges will persist without international recognition and economic reconstruction. He identifies potential leverage points in the regime’s succession dynamics: Defense Minister Mullah Yakub, son of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, demonstrates greater flexibility and interest in negotiated exchanges, while Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, though responsible for violent attacks, represents a relatively progressive voice on women’s issues within Taliban leadership. These more pragmatic figures could provide openings for engagement short of full diplomatic recognition.Yet such possibilities offer little comfort to women facing immediate erasure. Afghan women’s rights defenders continue to campaign to recognize gender apartheid as a crime under international law. Yet nearly four years after the Taliban’s return, not a single restrictive decree has been reversed. Women who could run for president in 2021 cannot now speak in public.“I think the ICC is doing the best that anyone is doing on this,” Mr. Fitton-Brown, who acknowledges that he isn’t typically a fan of the organization, assesses. “Something which I think is uncomfortable for the Taliban regime, but not enough in itself to bring them to any kind of compromise.” He advocates expanding ICC arrest warrants to include more Taliban leaders: “Show the Taliban that this isn’t going away.”

Taliban Codifies Slavery and Abuse of Women as World Debates Normalization

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