Written By Tilourshita Thiagu
Since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, Afghanistan was rewritten overnight with a series of decrees dismantling women’s rights. Girls disappeared from schools. Women vanished from workplaces. Public parks were emptied of mothers and daughters. With quiet efficiency, half the population was made invisible. No formal law issued this erasure, but the message was clear: women were no longer to be seen (UN Women, 2023).
The Taliban has not simply reinstated conservative social codes; they have installed a regime of ‘gender apartheid’. This term describes a system of institutionalised segregation, enforced by the state, where women are banned from participating in public life purely based on their sex (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, 2025). It is apartheid in every functional sense, just without international recognition.
Unlike racial apartheid, which was condemned, criminalised and prosecuted, gender apartheid floats in a legal vacuum. There is no specific article in the Rome Statute, no UN Convention, and no dedicated tribunal. It seems as if the tools of international law are designed for every kind of atrocity except this one, so the Taliban governs without fear of indictment, even as they make women disappear in broad daylight.
The regimes’ policies are deliberate and detailed. Girls beyond grade six are barred from attending school, and women have been forbidden from working in most professions or holding any managerial roles (Unicef, 2022). Women-run businesses, including beauty salons that once employed approximately 60,000 women nationwide, have been effectively shuttered. Even in sectors where women are not formally banned, restrictive measures make employment nearly impossible. This includes mandating that women be accompanied by a mahram (male guardian) when leaving the house and cover their faces in public (Human Rights Watch, 2025).
Healthcare is inaccessible to women in rural areas, not because it does not exist, but because male doctors cannot legally treat them. Female doctors no longer exist as it has been made illegal for women to receive medical training, resulting in unnecessary pain, misery, sickness, and death for the women forced to go without care (Human Rights Watch, 2024).
There is no plausible deniability. These are not random restrictions; they are policy. They are enforced by morality police, reinforced by surveillance, and justified in the name of religion. Women who protest are arrested, lashed, or simply disappear (The Guardian, 2024). Daughters are told to forget dreams of attending university. Mothers are told to stay home. The silence they are forced to live in echoes far beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
What makes this crisis more insidious is not just the Taliban’s cruelty but the world’s passivity. The response of governments and international organisations has been poor, often disorganised, politicised, and apathetic. When governments do engage, their focus is often on counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, business deals, or hostage returns. Despite Afghan women signalling and appealing otherwise, their rights protection agenda rarely makes it onto the priority list of diplomats (Human Rights Watch, 2024).
The law, too, offers no refuge for these women. Afghanistan is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), but the Taliban does not recognise its legitimacy. The International Criminal Court cannot prosecute crimes that do not exist in its statute, and ‘gender apartheid’, as a legal term, still belongs more to NGO reports than to courtrooms.
The problem is not just that these women have lost their rights. It’s that they have lost the language to describe what is being done to them. If the crime has no name, there can be no trial. No justice. No reparation. No truth.
International law has long claimed to be a shield for the most vulnerable. It bans torture, prohibits genocide, and punishes racial segregation. Yet it struggles when the violence is systemic and gendered. It is far more comfortable prosecuting war crimes committed with guns than policies carried out with decrees. But Afghan women are not dying on battlefields; they are being suffocated in silence.
Some say naming gender apartheid is a distraction, that it’s semantics. But language is not a luxury in law. It is the foundation. Racial apartheid was prosecuted in South Africa because it was named. Genocide in Rwanda was punished because it was defined. To leave gender apartheid unnamed is to allow it.
If the Taliban’s treatment of women is not a crime against humanity, what is? If it does not rise to the level of an international emergency, what does? And if the law cannot stretch to include it, then perhaps the law is not as universal as we thought.
Meanwhile, Afghan women remain behind closed doors. Some teach their daughters in secret. Some beg for their jobs back, and some do nothing, not because they have accepted defeat, but because the consequences of resistance are fatal. And still, the world waits. For what, it is unclear. For a diplomatic opening? For the Taliban to change? For the news cycle to make this issue ‘fashionable’ again?
But Afghan women cannot wait. Every day without recognition is another day of erasure. Naming gender apartheid won’t end their suffering, but it will say: we see you. We know this is a crime. And we refuse to let silence be the final word.
As the crisis deepens, the world must confront a pressing question: What does it mean to uphold human rights if the most egregious violations are met with silence?
References
Human Rights Watch. (2024, February 6). The Taliban and the global backlash against women’s rights.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/06/taliban-and-global-backlash-against-womens-rights
Ford, L. (2024, October 9). What is gender apartheid? Activists call for recognition in international law. The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/oct/09/what-is-gender-apartheid-acti vists-international-law-women-girls-rights-afghanistan-iran
UNICEF New Zealand. (2022, August 15). Girls in Afghanistan: One year on. https://www.unicef.org.nz/stories/girls-in-afghanistan-one-year-on
Human Rights Watch. (2025, April 30). Bread, work, freedom: Afghan women are still resisting. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/04/30/bread-work-freedom-afghan-women-are-still-resisting
Human Rights Watch. (2024, December 3). Afghanistan’s Taliban ban medical training for women.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/03/afghanistans-taliban-ban-medical-training-women
UN Women. (2023, August). In focus: After August – Voices of Afghan women two years after the Taliban takeover. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/in-focus/2023/08/in-focus-after-august-voices-of afghan-women-two-years-after-the-taliban-takeover
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. (n.d.). Gender apartheid. https://archive.unescwa.org/gender-apartheid
