An Afghan man can spend 15 days in jail for breaking his wife’s arm, or five months if he mistreats a camel. This is the law that judges in Afghanistan have been required to apply since the beginning of the year, under a new penal code approved quietly, without political debate or public announcements, and which has generated little international reaction. In 119 articles, violence against women is legalized and considered a tool of social discipline and the prevention of sin or “vice.” Mothers, daughters, and wives become practically objects owned by a husband or a “master” — a word used literally in the text, as well as “slave” — terms that send shivers down the spines of human rights organizations, which are calling for this legal framework to be repealed.
Experts interviewed by this newspaper agree that the new code is a “painful confirmation” of what daily life has been like for Afghan women since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. “It codifies an ideological system in which punishment, surveillance, and coercion are core instruments of governance,” summarizes the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
“The Taliban have always treated women as a system of apartheid. And this new code gives men the power to be violent against them and torture them legally,” Fawzia Koofi, a former Afghan parliamentarian and leader of Women for Afghanistan, told this newspaper.
For example, Article 32 gives an idea of the prevailing defenselessness, as it states that only if the husband strikes his wife with a stick and causes a serious injury such as “a wound or bruise,” and the woman can prove this before a judge, will the man be sentenced to 15 days in prison. Other types of physical, psychological, and sexual violence against women are not mentioned.
“In a place without a real judicial system, without defense lawyers or institutions that protect women, how can you believe that a woman will go to court knowing that 15 days later her husband will be free again and can kill her for having reported him?” Koofi asks.
Another article states that if a man mistreats an animal or provokes fights between camels, sheep, birds, or dogs, he will be punished with five months in prison. “It’s good that cruelty to animals is penalized, but now it’s clear that the physical integrity of a bird is valued more than that of a woman,” Koofi laments.
How can you believe that a woman will go to court knowing that 15 days later her husband will be free again and can kill her for having reported him?
Fawzia Koofi, former Afghan parliamentarian
Masters and slaves
Since 2021, the Taliban have issued more than 130 edicts that dangerously curtail women’s rights and social presence. They have barred Afghan girls over the age of 12 from education — something unheard of elsewhere in the world — and excluded them from most jobs. Eighty percent of women are now excluded from both the workforce and education, according to a recent UN Women report. For all these reasons, the UN considers that the fundamentalists have established a gender apartheid in which Afghan women are persecuted, unable to move freely, dress as they wish, speak in public, or enjoy even the most basic leisure activities.
And now all of that is law. For example, one article states that if a woman repeatedly goes to her father’s house without her husband’s permission and does not return even if he asks her to, she can be sentenced to three months in prison. “This provision exposes them to ongoing domestic violence and deprives them of family and community protection, the only protection left for women victims when formal and legal tools are lacking,” says the Afghan human rights organization Rawadari, which raised the alarm in January after obtaining the final draft of the legal framework.
“This new Taliban penal code tramples on Afghan law and grants men supervisory and disciplinary authority. Women are treated almost like slaves, with no control over their own lives and bodies,” Zahra Joya, an Afghan journalist and founder of Rukhshana, a media outlet focused on women’s rights in her country, told this newspaper.
The penal code also outlines a society divided into four strata: scholars, elites, middle class, and lower class. For the same crime, the punishment varies depending on the offender’s status, effectively burying fundamental rights such as equality before the law.
Nigara Mirdad, a former Afghan diplomat, emphasizes that this is incompatible with international treaties that the country has signed, for example, the Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted in Cairo in 1990 by the countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which takes Sharia law as its basis and reaffirms the dignity and protection of all human beings.
Women are treated almost like slaves, with no control over their own lives and bodies
Zahra Joya, journalist
“The new penal code formalizes discrimination against minorities and the suppression of basic individual freedoms and seriously increases the risk of intensifying and institutionalizing violence against women,” summarizes Rawadari, which has called on the international community, the UN and other international bodies to use all legal instruments at their disposal to prevent the application of this penal code.
Overall, the new legal framework exposes people, especially women and children, to arbitrary violence from relatives, neighbors, and even strangers, and transforms abuse into a religious and legal obligation rather than a crime. “Any Muslim who witnesses what is considered a ‘sin’ is authorized to impose corrective punishment on the spot to ‘prevent vice,’” the text states, clearly emphasizing that husbands and “masters” are explicitly empowered to punish their wives.
In the case of children, certain forms of physical violence by teachers are penalized, specifically when “bone fracture”, “torn skin” or “body bruising” are observed, but other forms of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse are not explicitly prohibited.
International silence
The new legal framework was approved two days before a visit to Kabul by Rosemary DiCarlo, UN Under-Secretary-General and head of the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, who met with the de facto Taliban authorities and did not mention the approval of this new code.
“I don’t know what the world is waiting for,” Koofi laments. “The women and girls I speak to every day are frustrated and angry, not because of the Taliban’s actions, because we know who they are, but because our allies completely ignore them and try to save their careers instead of saving them,” she adds.
The official stressed that if an Afghan child grows up seeing that they have the power to perpetrate violence, in the long term this situation could become “a major challenge to global security.” “The international community forgets the connection between the grave violation of women’s rights, which must be considered a crime against humanity, and the security and protection of the world,” she noted.
The special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, is the only UN official to have reacted so far, acknowledging that the consequences of this new penal code are “extremely worrying.” He is scheduled to present a new report on the rights of Afghan women on Thursday in Geneva.
For experts, this regulation also raises other fundamental issues, such as the UN’s presence in Afghanistan when the de facto government is crossing every basic red line. “But if the UN leaves, there will be no humanitarian aid for hundreds of thousands of people in a country where 40% of the population lives in extreme poverty. It’s a difficult dilemma,” a lawyer specializing in Afghanistan, who preferred to remain anonymous, told this newspaper.
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