NEWS
Afghanistan: the International Criminal Court charges the Taliban leadership with gender persecution
June 2026
The fact
On 8 July 2025 Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against the Taliban's supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and its chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds (article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute). According to the judges, since seizing power on 15 August 2021 the Taliban have systematically deprived women and girls — through decrees and edicts — of the rights to education, movement, expression, and private and family life, and have also targeted those who did not conform to their gender policy and those perceived as “allies of women and girls.” Girls are barred from education beyond the primary level; women are banned from most work and from movement without a male guardian. The warrants remain under seal, but the Court disclosed their existence because the conduct is ongoing and awareness may help prevent it. The Taliban rejected the decision as “nonsense” and declared they do not recognise the Court.
Legal commentary
The Chamber set a point that widens the reach of the law: gender persecution is not only direct violence, but also institutionalised harm — the imposition of discriminatory social norms. It is the first time the Court has charged gender persecution as a crime against humanity. The framework of denied rights also engages the Convention on the Rights of the Child (girls' education) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which Afghanistan ratified in 2003. UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett has called the cumulative effect of the restrictions tantamount to gender apartheid — but a distinction must be kept here: gender apartheid is not (yet) a crime under the Rome Statute, which is precisely why the Court used the closest available category, persecution; Afghan women and jurists are campaigning for its codification. And the warrants are at the level of “reasonable grounds,” not a conviction.
Not religion, but power
It must be said plainly, because it defuses the most common reading — “it's their religion.” The Taliban measures were condemned as contrary to sharia by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the highest authority of Sunni Islam, who recalled the obligation for men and women to seek knowledge “from the cradle to the grave”; the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called for their reversal, and condemnations came from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Turkey and Pakistan. The decisive fact: Afghanistan is the only country in the world — Muslim or not — to ban secondary education for girls. A single case does not prove a rule about nearly two billion believers. This is why third-party bodies do not judge a religion, but a power structure: the Court does not charge a heresy, it charges persecution as a crime against humanity; the UN Rapporteur speaks of gender apartheid — a structure of domination, not a faith.
Implications
It is again the gap between the written law and its application. The warrants exist, the Court has spoken, but Akhundzada and Haqqani remain in power and the Taliban do not recognise The Hague: as with the warrants for al-Bashir or for Netanyahu and Gallant, the judicial act alone arrests no one. The criterion, though, is independent of identity: gender persecution is a crime whoever commits it, and the same standard questions every regime that subjugates women, not only the one in Kabul. UN experts translate it into a warning: no normalisation of a regime that denies fundamental rights to more than half its population. To look away here is to let the exclusion of half a people become a normality no one contests. The law applies to everyone, or it applies to no one.
Sources: ICC · OHCHR · Al Jazeera · France 24 · al-Azhar · OIC