Human rights in Afghanistan
Authorities have used physical violence, raids, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, enforced disappearances of activists and political opponents.
The communist Khalq republic that governed Afghanistan after the Saur Revolution in 1978 was brutal, vigorously suppressing opposition.
New leader Babrak Karmal promised to end the Khalq's brutality, which it partly did, but human rights abuses still continued.
Under President Mohammad Najibullah's reforms, freedom of expression was further improved but human rights overall remained restricted.
The Taliban, in power from 1996, imposed strong restrictions on women, performed public executions, and prevented international aid from entering the country for starving civilians.
While the ongoing turmoil, violence and reconstruction efforts often make it difficult to get an accurate sense of what is going on, various reports from NGOs have accused various branches of the Afghan government of engaging in human rights violations.
[15] Former Afghan warlords and political strongmen supported by the US during the ousting of the Taliban were responsible for numerous human rights violations in 2003 including kidnapping, rape, robbery, and extortion.
[16] Some members of the Afghan National Security Forces were involved in killing civilians in ground operations as well as in air strikes.
[17][18][19][20][21][22] In March 2002, ABC News claimed top officials at the CIA authorized controversial, harsh interrogation techniques.
Some members of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS) have been accused of running their own prisons, torturing suspects, and harassing journalists.
[35] On August 14, 2020, the United Nations experts demanded the Afghanistan government take an early decisive action to prevent the killing of human rights defenders.
[38] Article 34 of the Afghan Constitution allows freedom of speech and press, though there are restrictions on media that may invoke Islamic law or be offensive to other sects.
[40] In 2008, documentary filmmaker Nasir Fayaz was arrested for criticising politicians from the President's cabinet on his weekly show on Ariana TV.
In 2014, an Afghan Muslim who had renounced Islam and had become an atheist was granted asylum in the United Kingdom, on the grounds that he could face death if he returned to his country of origin.
According to Britain's Independent newspaper, the 'family code' was not read in the Upper House/Senate, and also enshrines gender discrimination in inheritance law and divorce against women.
[49] On 18 September 2020, President Ashraf Ghani signed a new law to include mothers' names on their children's birth certificates and identification cards.
Afghan women's rights activists had been campaigning on social media for several years to include the name of both parents, under the hashtag #WhereIsMyName.
[50] In May 2022, the Taliban's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice published a decree requiring all women in Afghanistan to wear full-body coverings when in public (either a burqa or an abaya paired with a niqāb, which leaves only the eyes uncovered).
[51][52] On 23 January 2025, International Criminal Court issued two warrants against the Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and the Chief judge, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for committing the crimes against humanity with the oppression and persecution of Afghan women and girls, who have been deprived of the freedom of movement, the rights to control their bodies, to education, and to a private and family life, whereas the alleged resistance and opposition are brutally suppressed with murder, imprisonment, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual violence, since 2021.
[53] Homosexuality and cross-dressing were capital crimes under the Taliban; however, the death sentence of old has been replaced by prison terms of one year.
