Afghanistan: The European Parliament Confronts Institutionalised Gender Apartheid

By CAP Liberté de Conscience May 2026

The Edifice of Erasure

Since the Taliban’s illegal seizure of power in 2021, Afghan women and girls have been subjected to systematic persecution through more than 150 edicts. These decrees have stripped them of education beyond sixth grade, employment, justice, freedom of movement, healthcare, and public life. The numbers are stark, but the mechanism is what matters: not a single violent rupture, but a cumulative architecture of exclusion, built edict by edict, until the public sphere contains no women at all.

The European Parliament’s resolution of 21 May 2026, adopted under reference TA-10-2026-0186 (2026/2737(RSP)), addresses the latest layer of this architecture: the Taliban’s adoption of the Criminal Procedure Code for Courts. The text does not treat this Code as a technical legal instrument. It treats it as what it is — an instrument of institutionalised violence, dressed in the language of procedure.

The Document and Its Mandate

The Parliament adopted this resolution on 21 May 2026, invoking Rules 150(5) and 136(4) of its Rules of Procedure. It builds on a sequence of prior resolutions on Afghanistan, but its focus is sharpened by the specific threat posed by the new Code. The mandate is direct: to condemn the Code, to demand its repeal, and to call for the recognition of the Taliban’s practices as crimes against humanity.

The resolution grounds its analysis in the concrete provisions of the Code. It notes that the text criminalises criticism of the authorities and grants judges broad discretionary powers. It erodes women’s rights by legalising domestic violence, criminalising women who seek protection from abuse, institutionalising corporal punishment amounting to torture, recognising slavery, and prescribing the death penalty without fair trial guarantees. The Code grants husbands discretionary authority to punish wives for disobedience, subjects women who leave Islam to indefinite imprisonment, and institutionalises discrimination based on gender, religion, and social status. It provides no right to legal representation and no safeguards against forced confessions. The removal of women judges, prosecutors, and lawyers leaves women without remedies — a structural void that violates Afghanistan’s obligations under the ICCPR, the UNCAT, and the Slavery Convention.

The Mechanics of the Code

Point B of the resolution’s preamble identifies the Code’s core function: it criminalises dissent and concentrates arbitrary power in the hands of judges. Point C unpacks the specific provisions targeting women. The language is precise. “Legalising domestic violence” is not a euphemism for toleration; it is the removal of any legal barrier between a husband and the corporal punishment of his wife. “Criminalising women seeking protection from abuse” turns the victim into the offender. “Indefinite imprisonment” for apostasy removes the temporal limit that even the most repressive legal systems often retain. The Code does not merely permit violence; it mandates and structures it.

The resolution notes that the Taliban have significantly increased public floggings and corporal punishments, including against at least 170 women in 2025. Point D records this with the same factual brevity that makes it unmistakable. Public flogging is not a disciplinary measure; it is a spectacle of submission, designed to demonstrate that the state holds the power to humiliate, and that the community is required to witness.

Gender Persecution and the International Response

Point E of the preamble states that the Taliban regime has “institutionalised gender persecution and gender apartheid.” The resolution notes that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Taliban leaders Akhundzada and Haqqani for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds. This is not a symbolic gesture. It places the Taliban’s practices within the framework of international criminal law, making individual leaders liable to prosecution and extradition.

The Parliament’s demands follow from this analysis. It strongly condemns the Code and calls for its immediate repeal. It declares that the Taliban regime has institutionalised slavery, gender apartheid, and child marriage, and calls on the Council and the Commission to support their recognition as crimes against humanity in the proposed Crimes Against Humanity Treaty. It demands an immediate end to public floggings, corporal punishment, and executions, and the lifting of all restrictions on women and girls, LGBTQ+ persons, religious minorities, and other vulnerable groups in public life.

The Question of Recognition

The resolution carries a sharp rebuke to any move toward normalisation. It urges the Commission and Member States to uphold non-recognition and non-normalisation of the Taliban, in line with the Council’s five benchmarks. It explicitly regrets the decision to invite the Taliban to Brussels — a rare direct criticism of an EU institutional decision — and calls for pressure to be put on the Taliban to restore human rights, particularly women’s and girls’ rights. It reiterates full support for the ICC arrest warrants and urges Member States to enforce them.

This is not a resolution that leaves room for diplomatic ambiguity. The Parliament names the regime’s practices, names the leaders responsible, and names the legal mechanisms through which they can be held accountable. It calls on the Council to extend EU global human rights sanctions to Taliban leaders responsible for the persecution of women and girls, including travel bans and asset freezes. It urges the EU and its Member States to support the investigative mechanism established by the UN Human Rights Council and to increase humanitarian support for those combating famine in Afghanistan, with specific attention to Afghan women human rights defenders, judges, lawyers, journalists, activists, and women-led organisations.

CAP Liberté de Conscience welcomes the European Parliament’s resolution as a necessary and forceful institutional response to a regime that has constructed a system of gender apartheid with methodical precision. The organisation’s mandate — to defend freedom of conscience and religion or belief, to combat all forms of discrimination based on religion or conviction, and to alert European and international instances — aligns directly with the resolution’s provisions on religious minorities, women, and the institutionalisation of persecution.

The resolution’s recognition that the Code subjects women who leave Islam to indefinite imprisonment places the question of religious freedom at the centre of the gender persecution framework.

The Persistence of the Present

The resolution is dated 21 May 2026. Its verbs are in the present tense because the violations it describes are ongoing. The 150 edicts remain in force. The Code has not been repealed. The floggings continue. The women judges, prosecutors, and lawyers have not been reinstated. The public sphere remains empty of women.

The Parliament has condemned. The Council has been called upon to act. The ICC has issued its warrants. The question is whether these instruments of international law will be activated or whether they will remain, like the empty chairs in a courtroom, symbols of a justice that has not yet arrived.

The resolution ends with an instruction: the President of the Parliament is to forward the text to the Commission, the Council, the VP/HR, the Member States, the UN, and the de facto Afghan authorities. The last addressee is the regime itself. The gesture is formal, but it carries a substantive message: the European Parliament has documented your crimes, named your practices, and placed you within the reach of international law. The next move is yours, and the world is watching.