More than two years after regaining power in August 2021, Taliban hardliners are in control. There’s still a degree of internal dispute and the de facto regime continues to rule by decree in the absence of a constitution that sets out the rules of governance – but it has unfortunately made strides in its campaign to replace the ousted government’s laws with religious ordinances.

At the start, things differed from the Taliban’s first theocratic reign two decades prior. There was an apparent aim this time to present a more moderate international image, meaning that restrictions on fundamental rights and freedoms were imposed more gradually. But now the work is almost done. In September, United Nations (UN) rights chief Volker Türk reported to the Human Rights Council that ‘human rights in Afghanistan are in a state of collapse’.

Civil society inside Afghanistan has been beaten into near total silence. With media freedoms and online expression under siege, it’s become incredibly challenging even to document human rights violations.

Afghan activists in exile are also at risk, as Taliban supporters abroad are encouraged to kill the regime’s critics. The families of exiled activists are punished.

Hit hardest are Afghan women, who’ve gradually lost their rights to work, education and leisure. Two and a half years after the Taliban takeover, they’ve been erased from public life. And yet they’re the ones leading the rare acts of rebellion that continue against the odds.

No space for civil society

Growing restrictions on freedoms of association, expression and peaceful assembly led to the CIVCUS Monitor downgrading Afghanistan from repressed to closed, the worst possible rating, in March 2023. This reflected the widespread violence and fear in which people live, punished merely for attempting to exercise their fundamental rights.

It seemed that things couldn’t get any worse, but they did.

In July 2023 the Taliban abolished the Attorney General’s Office and replaced it with the ‘Directorate of Supervision and Prosecution of Decrees and Orders’, in charge of ensuring the implementation of decrees issued by their Supreme Leader. The decree establishing the new institution also reportedly gave intelligence services – the arm of the regime most often responsible for arbitrary incommunicado detentions and other forms of mistreatment of activists – an extensive role in investigating and prosecuting crimes.

Throughout the year the Taliban continued to suspend the licences of surviving civil society organisations (CSOs) and seize their assets, often on the basis that they were allegedly led by women or had female employees. CSOs were also pressured to hire Taliban-approved staff and were shut down or saw their operations blocked if they refused.

Following a Quran-burning incident in Sweden’s capital, Stockholm, the Taliban announced a ban on the operations of Swedish CSOs in Afghanistan. This resulted in the partial suspension of activities by the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, which provides vital healthcare and supports education and people with disabilities. The Taliban also continued to shut down education projects for girls run by CSOs and stop girls accessing them.

Silence

Within two years of the Taliban takeover, the Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC) documented 366 abuses of press freedoms, including the deaths of three media workers, 23 cases of injuries and 176 detentions, often involving physical violence and torture.

During a single week in August, nine journalists and media workers were arrested in raids across five Afghan provinces. Later in August, the authorities detained an Iranian photojournalist at Kabul International Airport before he boarded a flight home after a 10-day personal visit. French-Afghan journalist Mortaza Behboudi spent 284 days in custody before being released from prison in October. He’d been detained two days after entering Afghanistan, accused of spying.

On 27 September, intelligence operatives raided and sealed the office of independent Radio Nasim, stopped it broadcasting and took the director and two of its journalists to the provincial intelligence headquarters, freeing them five hours later but keeping their mobile phones. Ten days later, the three men were again taken and held in an unknown location.

Fear understandably drives self-censorship. According to the AFJC, there are 14 different sets of regulations that media workers must comply with to avoid falling foul of the authorities.

Academics have also been targeted, detained for expressing opposition to the ban on women’s education or criticising government policies. In one case, a professor was detained simply for handing out free books. University lecturers are under instructions to ‘defend the ruling regime’ and ‘refrain from criticising or speaking against Taliban officials’, with many arrested for noncompliance. Writers, poets and anybody else deemed anti-Taliban are silenced. Musicians have been persecuted and their instruments destroyed because their art is viewed as leading to ‘immorality’.

As people have increasingly used VPNs to access banned social media sites such as TikTok, the government has sought to impose controls on the sale of mobile phones and targeted social media influencers. People have been arrested for social media posts, and even for critical posts made by relatives abroad. To counter critical narratives, the Taliban and pro-Taliban groups are making widespread use of fake social media accounts to spread disinformation and discredit critics and legitimate news sources.

Activists behind bars

Human rights activists, mostly women, have continued to organise informally to coordinate advocacy and mobilise demands – and have faced the consequences. The General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) routinely raids the homes of protest organisers and often detains them and their relatives. Violence is used to gain access to detainees’ mobile phones to identify other members of protest networks. Activists are often subjected to coercive interrogations to force them to give up information and made to sign documents vowing not to talk to the media or take part in any further protest activities. Raids are used to disrupt meetings of women planning protests and prevent these happening.

Some detainees are held for a relatively short time, but others endure weeks or months behind bars. They are often held incommunicado, with no access to legal representation or due process, and their family members are denied any information about their whereabouts or charges against them. Police are often unaware of detentions enforced by the GDI and are therefore unable to offer any information.

A September report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented more than 1,600 human rights violations linked to arrests and detention between January 2022 and July 2023. While noting that torture and ill-treatment in custody were widely underreported due to pervasive surveillance, harassment and intimidation, UNAMA recorded 259 instances of physical torture and ill-treatment in custody, 207 instances of mental suffering through coercive questioning, including threats to kill interviewees or family members, and 18 deaths.

Among those on the receiving end of such tactics was Neda Parwani, detained on 19 September during a raid on her home. Her husband and four-year-old son were arrested alongside her. More than a month later all three were believed to still be in detention. Another activist, Zholia Parsi, was detained during a raid on her house on 27 September. Taliban troops reportedly removed mobile phones, laptops and documents. Parsi’s son was detained that same day.

Girls’ education activist Matiullah Wesa spent over half a year in detention after being arrested in late March. He’d been detained shortly after returning from an international trip. A news report quoted a Taliban official as linking his detention to his ‘meetings with Westerners’. The day after his arrest, Matiullah’s house was reportedly searched and two of his brothers were beaten by Taliban soldiers.

Former detainees report that torture and ill-treatment are widespread, including the use of repeated and brutal beatings and electrocution. A woman detained in August, for instance, was tortured, sexually abused and threatened with having immodest photos of her posted online if she didn’t stop her activism.

Protest resilience

Systematic repression has made protests a rare occurrence. But although they’ve diminished in size and frequency as repression has intensified, remarkably, they’ve never ceased completely.

On 19 July, a women’s protest in Kabul was prompted by the announcement that the authorities would forcibly close beauty salons – one of the very few trades still open to women and the single major remaining meeting place for women once they were banned from school, work and even public parks. Around 50 women gathered with banners calling for ‘bread, work and justice’. Taliban security forces dispersed them with water cannon, fired shots into the air and beat them with rods, and also reportedly used electric stun guns and confiscated protesters’ phones.

In August, ahead of the second anniversary of Taliban rule, a small group of women in burqas gathered to demand the right to education in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif.

Some men have also challenged the authorities over their erasure of women’s rights. In early September, for instance, male university students in Mazar-e Sharif graffitied slogans calling for the resumption of girls’ university education.

But other planned protests, such as those around Independence Day in September, were pre-emptively suppressed. Activists have increasingly adjusted their activities to reduce risk, holding indoor rallies in private homes and sharing photos and videos of events on social media and through their networks at home and abroad. These brave acts are the only reason any international attention has continued to focus on Afghanistan at a time when so many other tragedies are unfolding in the world.

The End Gender Apartheid campaign

Afghan women want the world to recognise the Taliban’s rule as what it is: a regime of gender apartheid. They want this specific and extreme form of gender-based discrimination and exclusion to be codified as a crime under international law. The 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid only applies to racial hierarchies, but they want it extended to gender. To that end, on International Women’s Day in 2023 and alongside their Iranian peers, they launched the End Gender Apartheid campaign.

Campaigners want the concept of gender apartheid, currently used only as a descriptive tool, to be recognised as a political one, signalling that the international community won’t tolerate the practice. And most importantly, they want it to be legally recognised as a crime to open pathways for the prosecution of those responsible for it.

The campaign makes three major demands to states: that they amplify and centre the experiences of women living under gender apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran; make statements, issue resolutions and shape other policy responses to condemn Afghanistan and Iran’s gender apartheid regimes; and interpret or expand the legal definition of apartheid under international and national laws to include severe forms of institutionalised gender‑based discrimination.

They’ve found some people ready to listen. In June, UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan Richard Bennett warned that the systematic eradication of women’s and girls’ fundamental human rights by the Taliban may constitute the crime against humanity of gender persecution, and expressed concerns that the Taliban ‘may be responsible for gender apartheid, a serious human rights violation, which although not yet an explicit international crime, requires further study in our view’. The concept was also invoked in an October resolution by the European Parliament.

But this isn’t nearly enough. Progress in calling out Afghanistan’s gender apartheid regime must be accompanied by actions to hold those responsible to account. Local, regional and international human rights organisations continue to call for the establishment of a dedicated accountability mechanism to work alongside the UN Special Rapporteur. They call on states to adopt a tougher stance towards the Taliban regime, still unrecognised internationally and largely led by men under international sanctions for terrorism.

The international community is starting to forget Afghanistan and leave Afghan women to fend for themselves. But this opens the risk of normalising the kind of appalling attacks on women’s rights that characterise the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime and giving encouragement to those around the world who’d like to follow suit. That mustn’t be allowed to happen.