A new report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, warns that Taliban policies targeting women and girls are pushing the country toward a worsening health and human rights crisis. The report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council focuses on the right to health and describes how restrictions imposed since the Taliban returned to power in 2021 are systematically undermining access to medical care, particularly for women.
Drawing on consultations with more than one 130 Afghans still living inside the country, Bennett’s findings point to a health system already weakened by decades of conflict, poverty, and reliance on foreign donors that is now deteriorating further under Taliban rule. While recent cuts in international funding have compounded the problem, Bennett’s report concludes that policies restricting the rights of women and girls are playing a central role in deepening the crisis.
According to the report, the Taliban’s restrictions on freedom of movement, employment, and education have created new barriers that prevent women from accessing essential health services. The policies extend across nearly every aspect of daily life and include strict dress codes, requirements that women travel with a male guardian, and limits on which health workers are permitted to treat female patients.
These measures are already producing life-threatening consequences. Bennett described cases in which women were denied ambulance services because they were not accompanied by a male guardian. In one instance documented in the report, a woman was forced to give birth outside a hospital gate after arriving unaccompanied and being refused entry. In another case, a mother was unable to take her young son to a hospital on her own, and the child later died.
Speaking to journalists in Geneva, Bennett warned that the consequences of these policies are already becoming clear. “The Taliban’s restrictions must be reversed, otherwise they will be killing people,” he said.
Bennett warned that such restrictions are not isolated policies but part of what he called an institutionalized system of discrimination against women and girls. In his remarks to the Human Rights Council, he said the measures deny women autonomy over their bodies, their health, and their futures.
The impact is particularly severe because Afghanistan’s health system depends heavily on female health workers to treat women and girls. Gender segregation policies already limit interactions between male doctors and female patients. At the same time, the Taliban’s decision to ban women from higher education, including medical training, has effectively cut off the pipeline of future female doctors, nurses, and midwives.
“The ban has effectively shut down the pipeline of new women health professionals,” Bennett said. “It is completely unjustifiable and puts the entire health system in jeopardy.”
Without new generations of trained female health professionals, women may increasingly find themselves without access to medical care altogether. He said the ban on medical education for women could lead to rising maternal and infant mortality in the coming years.
The report also places the health crisis within the broader context of Afghanistan’s deteriorating human rights situation. Bennett told the Human Rights Council that the Taliban are systematically depriving women and girls of their fundamental rights across all areas of life. He said these actions reinforce earlier conclusions that Taliban policies amount to crimes against humanity.
Quoting a female doctor still working inside the country, Bennett told the Human Rights Council that health for women and girls in Afghanistan is inseparable from freedom itself.
“Today in Afghanistan, being healthy means much more than not being sick,” the doctor said. “It means having access to basic health care, enough nutritious food, clean water, safe shelter, and mental well-being. But for women and girls, health also depends on something even more fundamental – freedom: freedom to move, freedom to study, freedom to work, and freedom to seek care without fear.”
Despite the scale of the crisis, Bennett stressed that Afghan health workers, particularly women, continue to serve their communities under extraordinary pressure. Their work, he said, demonstrates the resilience of Afghan society even as the space for women’s participation in public life continues to shrink.
The report urges the Taliban to reverse policies restricting women’s rights and calls on the international community to maintain humanitarian support for the Afghan population while ensuring assistance does not legitimize or strengthen the authorities responsible for these abuses. Bennett also emphasized that accountability mechanisms must investigate violations of the right to health and gender based violence in Afghanistan.
Bennett warns that without urgent action, the situation will continue to deteriorate. He called on the Taliban to immediately reverse restrictions on women’s rights, including bans on education and limitations on freedom of movement. He also urged the international community to maintain humanitarian support for Afghanistan while strengthening accountability mechanisms to investigate abuses.
“Protecting the right to health in Afghanistan requires restoring the rights and dignity of women and girls,” Bennett said.
As the Human Rights Council considers the report, the crisis in Afghanistan illustrates the consequences of policies that systematically exclude half the population from public life. For Afghan women and girls, the right to health is no longer simply about access to hospitals or medicine. It is about whether they are allowed to exist freely in society at all.