According to UNAMA’s most recent human rights report, which was released on Thursday and covers the first quarter of 2025, Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities have carried out regulations intended to eradicate women from the nation’s public life and limit their freedom of movement.
Afghan Taliban violations of women’s rights are extreme and systematic, and have increased since their resurgence to power in August 2021. The Taliban have implemented draconian limitations that effectively erase women and girls from public life and infringe on their basic human rights in a range of domains.
Secondary and university education is forbidden for girls and women, with no access to education beyond the sixth grade in schools and restrictions on women’s medical education. The prohibition continues despite global criticism. Women are excluded from all professions except some in primary education, health services, and security work. Women-owned enterprises, including beauty parlors that had employed tens of thousands of women, have effectively been closed down.
As reported, the experts kept hearing about Afghan women being excluded from the workforce and unable to get services without a male relative, while girls continue to be denied the opportunity to acquire an education. The UN analysis demonstrates that women and girls have been systematically denied equal participation in society since the Taliban overthrew the democratically elected government in August 2021.
Public floggings, a reduction in public space, and violent assaults on former government officials were also documented by UNAMA, which is tasked with monitoring human rights. According to UNAMA, authorities have closed women’s radio stations and beauty shops owned by women in several areas.
Shopkeepers in a bazaar in the Kandahar province were urged by de facto inspectors to report women who were not accompanied by a mahram and to bar them from entering their establishments. Authorities at one hospital gave staff orders not to treat female patients who were not accompanied.
Taliban leaders have also tightened their crackdown on reeducation and religious freedom, stepped up the use of corporal punishment, and enforced harsher restrictions on media outlets.
According to the report, at least 50 Ismaili males were forcibly removed from their homes at night and coerced into converting to Sunni Islam in the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan between January 17 and February 3 under threat of violence.
During the reporting period, Taliban leaders attended public events where more than 180 individuals, including women and girls, were flogged for the crimes of adultery and homosexuality. Taliban representatives dispute the report’s recorded evidence that de facto authorities are still violating international norms and rights standards.