A newly published Taliban family law regulation is further institutionalizing discrimination and oppression against Afghan women and girls by codifying unequal rights in marriage, divorce, and family matters. The law also effectively removes Afghanistan’s previous minimum marriage age for girls by linking eligibility for marriage to puberty, which can begin as early as age nine.
Before the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan’s civil code set the legal marriage age at 16 for girls, while marriages involving girls under 15 were criminalized under the country’s 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law.
The regulation, titled the “Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses,” was approved by Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada and released by the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice on May 14. The decree establishes a legal framework that grants men broad authority over marriage and divorce while imposing significant legal and procedural barriers on women seeking separation from their spouses.
According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), the regulation creates a “deeply unequal framework” in which men retain unilateral power to dissolve marriages, while women are limited to narrow and highly restrictive judicial avenues. Rights groups and legal experts say the law reflects a broader pattern of Taliban policies that have systematically restricted the rights and freedoms of Afghan women and girls since returning to power in 2021.
UNAMA has raised alarm and warned that the decree further entrenches a system that denies Afghan women and girls, “autonomy, opportunity, and access to justice.” The organization also expressed concern that the regulation appears to legally recognize child marriage by including provisions governing marital separation for girls who reach puberty while married.
The regulation not only normalizes child marriage but also strips girls of meaningful legal protection. The decree allows a girl’s silence after reaching puberty to be interpreted as consent to marriage, raising serious concerns about coercion and the absence of free and full consent.
The regulation has also drawn criticism for failing to protect women from domestic violence. Women already face limited access to the legal system, discrimination within the justice system, and pressure to resolve disputes through informal mechanisms that may not guarantee fairness. Interpretations of the law point to the notion that abuse by a husband would not necessarily constitute grounds for divorce under the new framework, leaving many women trapped in abusive marriages with little legal recourse.
The decree comes amid an escalating humanitarian and economic crisis in Afghanistan. Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban have banned girls from secondary schools and universities, restricted women’s employment and movement, and dismantled many institutions that once provided protection for women facing forced marriage or violence.
Rights advocates warn that worsening poverty and the systematic exclusion of women from education and employment are creating conditions in which more families may feel forced to marry off their daughters at increasingly younger ages. Economic desperation has already contributed to a history of girls being exchanged in marriage to settle debts or survive extreme poverty.
For many Afghans, the outrage extends beyond the decree itself. It reflects the normalization of policies that continue to erase women and girls from public life while facing little meaningful accountability from the international community. In a country where millions of families are approaching the brink of poverty, the future for many young girls is becoming increasingly defined not by education, opportunity or autonomy, but by forced marriage and survival.
Nine-year-old girls should be sitting in classrooms, building futures through education, dreaming freely about who they want to become, and having the basic rights to fulfill those dreams. Instead, under Taliban rule, many now face the possibility of being pushed into dangerous marriages and sold off like animals before they are even old enough to understand what is being taken from them. As the international community continues to stand by, Afghan girls are watching their childhoods be ripped from their hands under a system that treats their lives as disposable.