Judges at the International Criminal Court on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for the leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban government and its chief justice, citing the draconian restrictions against women and girls as evidence of crimes against humanity.
The Taliban have “specifically targeted girls and women by reason of their gender, depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms,” the court said in a statement detailing the arrest warrants against Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s supreme leader, and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, the country’s top justice official.
Since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, they have mostly erased women from public life, preventing them from speaking outside, accessing most workplaces or going to public spaces like parks, gyms and salons.
Women cannot travel long distances without being accompanied by a male relative, and they must be covered from head to toe when outside the home. Girls cannot attend school beyond sixth grade.
These measures, affecting half of the country’s 41 million people, have made Afghanistan the most restrictive country in the world for women, experts say. Some accuse the Taliban of orchestrating a “gender apartheid.”
The court’s judges said that the policies imposed on the population had led to murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and forced disappearances.
“Individuals perceived as opposing these policies, even passively or through omission, were also targeted by the Taliban,” the court said in its statement.
A Taliban spokesman derided the statement as “nonsense.”
“We do not recognize any organization called the International Court, nor are we committed to it in any way,” the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said on X.
The warrants are unlikely to yield any arrests. Sheikh Haibatullah, the reclusive 64-year-old leader of Afghanistan, rarely makes public appearances and seldom travels abroad or even outside the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.
But the court’s action drew praise from women’s rights activists.
“We don’t have rights in Afghanistan, and the authorities are so misogynistic,” said Marjan, an activist based in Afghanistan who ran a business there until it was shut down by the Taliban last year.
Marjan, who requested that only her first name be used out of fear of retribution, said she hoped that the warrants would put some pressure on the Taliban to avoid imposing even stricter regulations.
The discrimination against women and girls has made Afghanistan a pariah state in much of the world. On Monday, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution raising alarm over the “grave, worsening, widespread and systematic oppression” of women and girls in the country.
The United States opposed the resolution, rejecting its call for engagement with the Taliban to address these issues and arguing that countries had engaged with the group without demanding concrete improvements.
Russia, which last week became the first country to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate authority, abstained from the vote.
Until now, there has been a broad international consensus to withhold recognition as a bargaining chip. But as the Taliban have rejected all outside pressure to relax its strictures on women and girls, some countries, including China, India and Pakistan, have sought tentative business and diplomatic ties with Afghanistan. Experts have called that a sign that this consensus might become more fragile.
Safiullah Padshah and Yaqoob Akbary contributed reporting from Kabul.
Elian Peltier is The Times’ West Africa correspondent, based in Dakar, Senegal.
Marlise Simons is a correspondent in the Paris bureau, focusing on international justice and war-crimes tribunals. In almost four decades at The New York Times, she has been based in France and Italy to report about Europe and previously covered Latin America from posts in Brazil and Mexico.
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