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Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan
Since 2021, Afghan women and girls have been removed step by step from schools, universities, workplaces and public life. Why so many now call it gender apartheid — and why the world must not look away.
There is no other country in the world where girls are forbidden by law from going to secondary school. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Afghan women and girls have been removed, decree by decree, from almost every part of public life. Human rights experts, Afghan women activists and many governments now describe this system with a phrase that once applied to South Africa: apartheid — not based on race, but on gender.
What Has Happened Since 2021
The restrictions did not come all at once. They arrived step by step, each one testing the world’s reaction:
- Girls have been barred from secondary school since 2021; a promised reopening in March 2022 was cancelled on the morning schools were due to open.
- In December 2022, women were banned from universities and from working for national and international aid organisations; the ban was later extended to work for the United Nations.
- Women have been barred from parks, gyms and public baths, and beauty salons were closed in 2023.
- Women may not travel long distances without a male guardian (mahram).
- A 2024 law on “the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice” requires women to cover their faces and bodies in public and treats their voices in public as something to be hidden.
- Women have also been excluded from medical and nursing training institutes, cutting off one of the last remaining paths of study.
Why “Apartheid”?
Apartheid in South Africa was a system of laws that separated people by race and denied one group basic rights in education, work, movement and political life. What is happening in Afghanistan has the same structure, applied to women: a legal system designed to keep half the population separate, subordinate and silent. The term is used deliberately, to show that this is not a collection of isolated restrictions but an organised system of domination.
Under current international law, apartheid is defined in racial terms, and gender apartheid is not yet listed as a separate crime. Afghan women and international lawyers have campaigned for it to be recognised, so that this kind of system can be named and prosecuted for what it is.
A country that forbids its daughters to learn is not protecting them. It is stealing their future — and its own.
Steps Towards Justice
On 8 July 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and its chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, finding reasonable grounds to believe they were responsible for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds. This was an important moment: the first time an international court formally named gender-based persecution in Afghanistan as a crime of this seriousness. Warrants alone do not change lives in Kabul, but they make clear that these are not cultural choices to be respected. They are crimes.
Not Culture, Not Faith
The Taliban justify their policies in the name of religion and Afghan tradition. But Afghan history tells another story. Afghan women have studied, taught, worked as doctors and served in parliament. Many Muslim-majority countries educate girls without question. What is happening is not the inevitable result of faith or culture; it is a political choice by a group that uses religion to justify control. Refusing to accept that justification is part of standing with Afghan women.
What We Can Do
- Keep speaking about it, so that the world does not grow used to it.
- Support underground and online education for Afghan girls.
- Amplify the voices of Afghan women themselves, inside and outside the country.
- Press governments not to normalise relations with a regime built on gender persecution.
- Challenge the idea, wherever we meet it, that women’s rights are a Western import rather than a universal human right.
Afghan women have not stopped resisting: they study in secret, teach in hidden classrooms and speak out despite the danger. The least the rest of us can do is to refuse to be silent.
Further reading
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