The Taliban has quietly enacted a sweeping new penal code that fundamentally reshapes Afghanistan’s legal system, formalizing violence, criminalizing dissent, legalizing slavery, and stripping women of legal personhood under the guise of religious law.
On January 7, Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada signed off on the “Penal Principles of Taliban Courts,” a document spanning 119 articles that took effect immediately without public announcement or consultation.
The regulation only became public weeks later after an Afghan human rights organization, Rawadari, published the Pashto text, raising alarm over provisions that legalize slavery, authorize private violence, and institutionalize repression across nearly every aspect of life.
According to the regulation, absolute obedience to the Taliban’s supreme leader is mandatory, with disobedience punishable by flogging or imprisonment.
Articles within the code criminalize any criticism of Taliban officials, failure to report perceived opposition activity, and even silence in the face of dissent. Even ordinary social interactions, like speaking to an unrelated woman or questioning authority, are treated as criminal acts and are punishable.
The penal code also codifies a rigid social hierarchy, dividing society into four classes and explicitly recognizing individuals as either “free” or “enslaved,” with harsher punishments imposed on those deemed lower status.
Human rights advocates warn this structure institutionalizes discrimination and revives concepts long prohibited under international law.
Women are among the most severely targeted. Under multiple iniquitous provisions, husbands are authorized to punish their wives through discretionary violence, while domestic abuse is only recognized as a crime in limited circumstances and carries a maximum sentence of 15 days imprisonment for the perpetrator.
In contrast, forcing animals to fight carries a longer prison sentence than severe violence against women, reinforcing a sinister legal hierarchy in which women’s lives are afforded less protection than animal welfare.
Regardless of the compounding edicts, this code manages to further criminalize women who leave their homes without permission, mandates imprisonment for women accused of apostasy, and allows corporal punishment to be imposed by family members or private individuals under the banner of “preventing vice”. Rights groups warn that these provisions normalize vigilante violence and completely erase women’s autonomy over their bodies, movement, and beliefs as well as state mandated religion.
Perhaps most alarming is Article 16, which authorizes the Taliban leader to approve executions for at least 11 broad categories of people under so-called discretionary punishments. These categories include individuals accused of opposing the Taliban, promoting beliefs deemed un-Islamic, sorcery, repeated “corruption,” and undefined moral offenses. The language is intentionally vague, granting sweeping authority to execute individuals deemed a threat to “public interest,” a term left deliberately undefined.
Legal experts warn the code’s ambiguity allows it to be weaponized against political opponents, religious minorities, women, and anyone perceived as nonconforming—confirming this move as one of many to further the Taliban’s desperate grasp for total control over the lives of Afghans. All executions require only the personal approval of Akhundzada, consolidating judicial, religious, and political power into a single authority.
The penal code serves as a blueprint for governance through fear. By embedding violence, surveillance, and discrimination into law, the Taliban has transformed repression into state policy, with particular consequences for women and girls who have already been erased from public life since 2021.
Despite the severity of the provisions, the international response has been muted. Apart from statements by the UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, the regulation has received little if any public condemnation, even as Taliban officials dismiss critics as infidels and warn that opposition to Taliban law itself constitutes a crime.
For Afghan women, this new penal code is not a legal reform but a painful confirmation of what daily life has already become: a system where violence is lawful, obedience is compulsory, and survival itself is criminalized.
What the Taliban has codified is not law but rather fear, weaponized and stamped with authority. It codifies gender apartheid and all forms of oppression. In what society should a person live under threat of flogging or imprisonment for speaking to a neighbor of the opposite sex, for questioning a decree, or for failing to report a private conversation? These provisions do not reflect the values, traditions, or history of Afghans or of Afghanistan. They represent a deliberate and forceful rupture from them.
For centuries, Afghan society has been built on the pillars of community, hospitality, debate, and shared public life and enjoyment. The new penal code criminalizes these longstanding foundations. By turning neighbors into informants, families into enforcers, and women into legal dependents that are valued less than a wild animal, the Taliban is not preserving culture but scrubbing it away.
The silence from the international community in response to these laws is near as alarming as the laws themselves. Beyond limited statements of concern, there has been no meaningful public reckoning with the reality that Afghanistan is now governed by a legal framework that institutionalizes gender apartheid, authorizes extrajudicial violence, and revives the language of enslavement. Engagement continues, diplomacy proceeds, and yet a legal regime that meets the threshold of crimes against humanity is allowed to harden into permanence.
These codes are not merely domestic policies. They will shape the psychological, social, and moral landscape of an entire population and a new generation who are growing up under the Taliban’s brutal regime. Children are being raised under a system where violence is law, obedience is survival, and women are denied humanity. The cost of inaction will not be measured only in today’s abuses, but in the long-term destabilization of Afghan society and the normalization of extremist governance beyond its borders.
This moment demands much more than quiet concern. It demands clarity, substantial condemnation, and consequence. The future of Afghanistan does not rest solely in the hands of those who rule by fear, but in the willingness of the world to refuse normalization, reject silence, and act before an entire country is lost to laws designed to destroy it.
Sources: GIWPS, Amu tv