The judges of the People’s Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan have found the Taliban guilty of the crime against humanity of gender persecution. Although this civil society tribunal does not have the force of law, it was conceived as a platform that could powerfully amplify the voices of women from both inside and outside Afghanistan, engage national and international media and provide evidence for any future prosecutions. The hearings were held in Madrid in October, after which the international panel of eight judges reviewed the evidence. They delivered their verdict in The Hague, where they also warned of the political ramifications of any normalisation of the Emirate’s diplomatic status. AAN’s Rachel Reid attended both the hearings and the verdict and heard from prosecutors, witnesses, organisers and experts about what the tribunal set out to do and what its findings might yet set in motion. 
The People’s Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan’s panel of judges read their final judgment during a session in The Hague. Photo: Rachel Reid, AAN, 11 December 2025These are not just my words; this is the pain of women who have been silent for the past four years and could not speak out. They were alive but not living; they were just breathing.The words of Witness 14 at the People’s Tribunal for the Women of Afghanistan, dedicating her testimony to all the women she described as having been silenced for the last four years. Her testimony was just one of many memorable moments in two days of hearings. Some witnesses gave their testimony in person, though some concealed their identities; testimony from inside Afghanistan came in the form of voice notes or written statements with simultaneous translation.
The Tribunal comes at a time when several countries are moving toward diplomatic engagement with the Emirate, despite, often at the same time, decrying its restrictions on women and girls. The fear of creeping normalisation was one factor driving the setting up of the Tribunal. It was requested by and primarily organised by four Afghan NGOs, with the assistance of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT), which has convened such tribunals since 1979, often to address crimes that would otherwise not be tackled by international justice mechanisms. Although the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders for the crime of gender persecution in July 2025, the Afghan organisers fear that arrests might be a distant prospect.
The witnesses provided the emotional power of the indictment, presented by four Afghan prosecutors, in which they accused ten individual Taliban leaders and the Taliban as a group and as the de facto rulers of Afghanistan of the crime of gender persecution and several other violations of international human rights law. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), which defends its policies towards women as religiously ordained, ignored multiple requests to provide a defence.
The tribunal was livestreamed in its entirety by Afghan media via satellite TV across Afghanistan and beyond, with around 350,000 people watching or engaging both the hearings and verdict on social media. People attending the hearings received photographs of friends and relatives in Afghanistan watching the proceedings in real time, in secret.
This report will provide an overview of the indictment and the testimony, as well as hearing from witnesses, organisers and experts on the tribunal’s political and legal significance.
The Hearings
The hearings were held in Madrid from October 8-10. They were opened by the Executive Director of Rawadari, Shaharzad Akbar, with a clear enunciation of the reasons why they had brought it into being:
We want this tribunal to be a platform to share the struggle of women, as well as to highlight their inspiring resistance. This tribunal will enable them to claim their right to be seen to speak and to demand justice in the face of the world’s most extreme system of gender-based oppression… The Taliban for now, make themselves untouchable through brutality. They maintain their violent patriarchal dystopia through the stolen lives of our mothers, our sisters, our daughters. We will not relinquish those lives. We will not relinquish hope. This tribunal puts on record the suffering of our sisters. It’s a form of resistance and remembrance.
Akbar was personally instrumental in instigating this People’s Tribunal, but the event itself was a feat of organisation by Rawadari and three other Afghan NGOs, Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), DROPS (Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies) and Human Rights Defenders Plus (HRD+). Organising such a tribunal often takes a year or more: this event was pulled together in just eight months.
The hearings were held over two days in Madrid at the offices of the Madrid Bar Association, a nineteenth-century building with gilded décor and walls lined with law books, lending the event a sense of grandeur. Around 100 people attended, mostly victims and survivors, along with some invited experts, UN officials and observers from the International Criminal Court. The panel of eight international judges sat on an elevated podium throughout the proceedings.
The four Afghan prosecutors, Benafsha Yaqoobi, Orzala Nemat, Moheb Mudessir, and Azadah Raz Mohammad, had submitted their indictment to the judges in advance of the hearings and opened proceedings by presenting their core allegations. The indictment focused on the crime against humanity of gender persecution and numerous violations of international human rights law. The prosecutors also made a case for the codification of a new crime of gender apartheid, a campaign initiated in 2023 to put the systematic and institutionalised nature of the Emirate’s policies towards women on a legal par with existing laws against systems of racial apartheid (explored in this AAN report). The prosecutors encouraged the judges to add their authority to the gender apartheid campaign in their verdict.
The indictment named the Taliban as a group and the State of Afghanistan as responsible for these crimes, as well as listing ten IEA leaders whom they said bore individual criminal responsibility (spellings as per the indictment):
- Habatullah Akhundzada (Supreme Leader);
- Sirajuddin Haqqani (Minister of Interior);
- Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob (Minister of Defence);
- Abdul Ghani Baradar (Deputy Prime Minister);
- Noor Mohammad Saqib (Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs);
- Sheikh Muhammad Khalid Hanafi (Minister for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice);
- Shaikh Abdul Hakim Haqqani (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court);
- Neda Mohammad Nadeem (Minister of Higher Education);
- Habibullah Agha (Minister of Education); and
- Abdul Haq Wasiq (Director of the General Directorate of Intelligence, GDI).
In her opening statement, Azadah Raz Mohammad explained that the prosecutors would establish that “the Taliban’s policies on gender persecution are not isolated or random. They’re systematic, institutionalised, and intentionally directed at women and girls solely on the basis of their gender. This is the very essence of gender-based persecution under international criminal law.”
Another prosecutor, Orzala Nemat, told AAN that the indictment had taken them months of work. The team had reviewed and cross-referenced evidence from academic journals and “credible” organisations and institutions, as well as considering the international treaties and conventions to which Afghanistan is a signatory, to clarify the legal framework. They also had a careful process of selecting witnesses, as well as interviewing the witnesses “several times, to make sure that the witnesses are ready and prepared to come and present their testimony in this tribunal.”
The witnesses
The testimony from the witnesses brought the many aspects of the crime of gender persecution into sharp focus. Their accounts were at times harrowing, yet the witnesses spoke with dignity, defiance and clarity of purpose. Several witnesses spoke of being assaulted in the streets, detained and tortured. Others spoke of the mental and financial strain caused by the sudden loss of their jobs, hopes for higher education and career ambitions.
For their security and that of their family members inside Afghanistan, witnesses were identified only by number rather than by names. Some came to the hearings in person, having fled into exile since 2021, though many still covered their faces. Others, still inside the country, sent testimony in the form of voice notes or written statements, which were read aloud by volunteers in the room, with simultaneous translation into three languages (Dari, Pashto and English).
As an indication of how determined some were to testify, one woman who could not send her audio testimony because of the two-day internet blackout in Afghanistan, made a risky and difficult journey to the border of a neighbouring country, just to find an internet connection and send her statement.
Protests, detentions and torture
Several of the witnesses had been part of the protests in the early weeks and months of the Emirate’s rule. Witness 22 recalled 15 August 2021, when the Taliban took over Kabul: “On that day, we lost everything we believed in.” She explained why she had felt she had no choice but to take to the streets: “The Taliban, from their very first days, denied women the right to education. And day by day, their restrictions increased, which was intolerable for us. So, we resorted to protests.”
Witness 13 had been a schoolteacher, originally from Herat. She too got involved in the protests but went into hiding after seeing other women arrested and tortured. In 2023, she was arrested, along with her two daughters: “I was tortured in their dreaded torture chambers in the worst ways. Due to their savage beating, my brain was damaged and my neck was severely injured; my ears bled for a full month.” She was eventually released after mediation by village elders, but said the experience left her whole family traumatised and forced them into exile: “[It was] the fear and dread that my children might be tortured that forced us to leave our homeland, my mother. I didn’t begin protesting in order to leave it.”
Several witnesses spoke of abuse at the hands of security forces. A woman, who is ethnic Hazara, described being sexually harassed by the notorious religious police from the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue Ministry, saying they had joked that it was halal – Islamically permitted – because she was Hazara. Witness 3 told of her attempt to seek protection from her violent husband, whom she had been married to at the age of ten. She said her husband’s violence “intensified with the arrival of the Taliban.” With nowhere else to turn to, she sought help from the Taliban:
When I took my petition to the Taliban, they tore it to pieces. They dragged me out of the police station; they beat me and told me that I was “a bad woman. … He is your husband. He is your owner. He has the right to beat you. You’re a bad woman. A woman who goes to the authorities to complain – we should put a bullet in her head and get rid of her. You are a bad woman”
Eventually, she ran away but was quickly arrested and returned to her husband. She ran away for a second time and this time, found some women protestors in Kabul to stay with. But then, the house was raided:
They beat all the girls and took our phones. They said, “You’re raising your voices against Islam,” but we were only asking for our rights: the right to work, the right to education, the right not to be forced into a marriage, and not to have our children taken from us. What crime had we committed that the Taliban tortured us and beat us? … The moment the Taliban attacked us, I thought it was the last day of my life. They said, “You are women. Women are the second sex. What we are doing to you is correct; it is stated in Islam.” They arrested all the girls and beat us. Some girls fainted and fell on the ground. The Taliban showed no mercy. We asked them to let us take a girl to the doctor, they said, “No, you are women. Women are deceitful.” They beat us, tortured us and insulted us.
Denial of education
The testimony and evidence presented were broken down by the prosecutors into several strands of the crime of gender persecution, as well as other violations of international human rights law, including the denial of education. Multiple witnesses spoke of this as a crushing loss.
Witness 18 said the ban had erased “our hope, plans, and the decisions we‘d made for our future.” She had tried to register for a post-graduate degree but was told: “Who gave women so many rights? You had seven or eight years of education, that’s enough for you, you have already learned too much.”
Witness 13, a former teacher, recounted her struggle to console girls whom she said would ask her: “What is our sin? What should we do? What crime have we committed besides pursuing an education?’ I’d encourage them to remain steadfast and resilient, but I’d cry to myself.” Several women recounted bruising interactions with Emirate-appointed officials at universities, including Witness 7. She tried to get her education certificate from the university where she’d studied, but said she was told: “You women committed prostitution for twenty years and now you want to continue those things? The Islamic Emirate has arrived.”
Denial of employment
For some witnesses, the loss of educational opportunities was tied to the loss of employment. Witness 14 said that taken together, these restrictions stripped women of their “autonomy and even dignity.” The impact of job losses was described in terms of the damage to mental health, as well as pushing families into poverty, particularly those where women were the primary breadwinners. Witness 19 was a journalist, who, like most women journalists, was forced out of her job. She and other journalists tried to hold a press conference to draw attention to the job losses, but were barred from doing so and detained.
They were holding their weapons, standing above us as if we were dangerous criminals – murderers – waiting to be executed. It was terrifying. One of them sat facing us, speaking in a vulgar and aggressive tone. He said, “We’ve come to make the country Islamic, to bring back the ways of Islam, and to make people true Muslims. But you’re making us look terrible to the world. You’re giving us a bad name.”
She said one of the Talibs shouted profanities and said: “How dare you, a woman, come here among non-mahrams and stand in front of me and speak?”
After she was released, she decided to go into hiding for a few days, but two days later, the Taliban raided her house:
They asked my husband, “Where is your wife?” My husband said, “I don’t know, she left yesterday, but she hasn’t come back home yet.” They told him: “What kind of man are you — letting your wife leave the house without a mahram, and you sit here without a care in the world, not even knowing where she is?” Then they beat him. They beat him right there in front of my children. My youngest, who was seven at the time, was terrified and screaming. My eldest tried to stop them – he shouted for them to stop beating his father — and they beat him too.
The family later managed to get over the border, but even from their place of relative safety, the trauma of those experiences endures:
The mental state of our whole family is, unfortunately, not very good. From my husband and me to my youngest son – we’ve all been deeply affected. Since the day the Taliban beat his father, my youngest has been in shock. Even after all these years, he still wets the bed at night. He’s older now, but he must still wear diapers. I have nightmares. At the slightest sound, I wake up with a start … thinking they’ve come back for us.
Denial of healthcare
Access to health services was another focus of the prosecutors’ case, as witnesses described the combined effects of Emirate policies on women’s ability to access even basic medical treatment. Time and again, witnesses spoke of not being able to receive care due to the restrictions on women’s movements, the constraints on the ability of women health workers to work, the segregation which prevents male doctors from treating female patients and the acute shortages of female doctors and nurses. From Kandahar, Witness 9 said: “There are no female dentists at all in the province and probably just one or two female doctors in the entire city. They have completely banned male doctors from treating female patients. Female patients are now even banned from seeing female doctors.” The situation, she said, was like going back in time, with women dying “because of very simple illnesses,” particularly now that women were having to give birth at home, “like a century ago.”
Women with disabilities
Some of the witnesses described difficulties and discrimination on multiple fronts, not least women with disabilities. Witness six, originally from Khost, lost the use of her legs in a suicide bombing in 2013 and has used a wheelchair or walker ever since. She described an encounter with the Vice and Virtue police when she was trying to get to her doctor’s office. Even though she was wearing a long dress and hijab, she was told her clothes were “inappropriate.”
I explained to them that I was disabled and used a walker to move. I told them that if I wore longer or heavier clothing, as they demanded, it would get caught under my walker or wheelchair and cause me to fall and injure myself. But they refused to listen. They said, “No matter what your condition is, you must wear the clothing we prescribe. If we see you again dressed like this, we’ll take you to the police station.” I was terrified. With tears in my eyes, I returned home.
She said that since the incident, she has stopped going out, “and every day I feel the walls closing in on me.” She also described the frustration of being unable to leave the house by herself:
Even when I need to go somewhere, I cannot find a mahram to accompany me, as required by Taliban rules. This dependency is deeply painful. The emotional wound of being treated as helpless is worse than my physical disability. There is no cure for that pain.
An Islamic scholar’s challenge to the Emirate
Towards the end of the hearings, the prosecutors invited evidence from an Indonesian Islamic scholar, Dr Nur Rofiah, who teaches at the University of Quranic Sciences in Jakarta, Indonesia and was representing the Congress of Indonesian Women Ulema. Rofiah condemned the Taliban’s “misusing of the Islamic sharia against women,” stating that “Islam views men and women as equal human beings,” with the “right to seek knowledge and to access economic resources, healthcare services and other essential aspects of life.” She also challenged the Taliban’s notion that women are the source of fitna (temptation to sin): “Is it women or the mindsets about women as sexual objects that is the source of fitna?”
The Emirate’s (non-) response
During the course of the hearings, the judges repeatedly invited any representative of the Taliban to present their defence. Prior to the hearings, a letter was sent to the IEA’s Foreign Ministry, requesting their participation and offering assistance. No response was ever received. The Emirate’s silence reflects its longstanding stance of rejecting international scrutiny and dismissing attempts to hold its leaders accountable. When the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for gender persecution for the Emirate’s Amir and Chief Justice, for example, deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat, defended their record as upholding “the religious and national values of the Afghan people within the framework of Islamic Sharia.” The Emirate, he wrote, “does not recognize any legal obligation under the Rome Statute and deems the previous administration’s accession to this statute to be devoid of legal validity” (statement issued on X on 19 February 2025). The question of whether the Emirate can withdraw Afghanistan from the Rome Statute is a subject of debate, given that it is still recognised by the member states of the Rome Statute or the United Nations (as argued here in the European Journal of International Law).
The judgement
At the close of the hearings, the judges gave a preliminary verdict. One, Dr Ghizaal Haress – an Afghan constitutional lawyer and former Ombudsperson of the Republic – sent a powerful message to Afghan women: “The panel of judges assure the women of Afghanistan that they have been heard.”
The judges spent two months considering the indictment, testimony and other evidence they had been given. They came together in The Hague on December 11 to deliver their verdict. It upheld everything the prosecutors had asked for and added some pointed recommendations.
First, the judges found that the “Taliban’s sustained and deliberate campaign of gender persecution, carried out through edicts, institutional decrees, and systematic violations, constitutes a direct and egregious violation of international criminal law.”
While recognising that gender apartheid is not yet recognised in international law, the judges basically accepted the prosecutors’ argument in its favour, saying: “The situation in Afghanistan meets the constitutive elements of an apartheid-like system, an institutionalized regime of segregation, exclusion, and domination,” and recommended that the UN and member states should support its codification. The judges also confirmed that there had been multiple violations of international human rights law:
[T]he Taliban have intentionally, and severely deprived women and girls of fundamental rights, including the right to life, the right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the right to personal liberty and security, the right not to be subjected to arbitrary detention, the right to education, the right to work, the right to health, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, the right to bodily autonomy, and the civil and political rights of participation.
The judges described the impacts of gender persecution in terms of physical harm done to women and the psychosocial ill-effects on women, girls and men, as well as on the social fabric of Afghanistan. The judges observed that, while many witnesses were able to speak relatively freely about some forms of physical abuse, any “reference to rape and sexual violence in custody is subtle,” though they did draw attention to a witness who said: “Even our colleagues and friends in Taliban prisons were raped, oppressed and tortured.”
The judges were clear about the Taliban’s criminal responsibility, both individually and as a group. Although the judgment did not ascribe specific crimes to any of the ten individuals named by the prosecutors, it said:
Statements from Taliban leaders explicitly justify their decrees and bans through an ideological framework that prioritizes male dominance and defines women as subordinate under a restrictive interpretation of Sharia. …The system is not the result of isolated or spontaneous acts but rather a State-organized and systematic policy designed to exclude women and girls from all aspects of public life, restrict their freedoms, and subordinate them to male authority.
Alongside their legal findings, the judges also warned about the danger of normalising the Taliban administration, which had been a common refrain of witnesses. Citing Russian recognition in July 2025 and the “dangerous” trend for increased diplomatic presence in Afghanistan and the appointment of Taliban officials abroad, the judges said:
First, the immediate political impact is that it will embolden the Taliban while simultaneously diminishing international leverage. … Second, the normative and human rights impact of normalization is profound. It risks undermining the universality of women’s rights by signalling that women’s freedoms can once again be sacrificed for political convenience. Third, the effect on global norms and precedents is deeply troubling. It erodes the longstanding taboos against normalizing regimes of institutionalized oppression. … Finally, normalization will severely harm Afghan women and girls. … [it] erodes hope, weakens advocacy, and ultimately reinforces the Taliban’s control over society, prolonging their repressive rule.
They made a series of recommendations, starting with a call to the Taliban to reverse a host of repressive policies. They also urged the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Muslim countries and Islamic institutions and scholars to issue fatwas and legal opinions “publicly rejecting the regime’s restrictions on women as having no basis in Sharia and violating established Islamic principles of justice, dignity, and equality.” On the subject of normalisation, they were concrete, calling on governments to “suspend diplomatic relations and revoke accreditation of Taliban-appointed diplomats” until there is verifiable and sustained progress. They also criticised the efforts of several European states to deport Afghans, including some women (DutchNews).
Hope and validation: Reactions to the tribunal
The tribunal offered a rare occasion for Afghan women to be centre stage, Witness 1 told AAN in The Hague:
This tribunal is important to me both as an ordinary woman and as a woman who was imprisoned in a land where a woman’s voice, her identity, her honour and her human dignity are being trampled on. … Even if the tribunal doesn’t have an immediate impact – today or tomorrow – the very fact that I can formally tell my story means that I’m taking back my honour and the human dignity that were crushed under the Taliban’s feet and in their prisons.
Many of the organisers, prosecutors and witnesses said they had been contacted by friends and family inside Afghanistan to say how important it was to see their experiences reflected at the hearings. Witness 2 told AAN that women inside Afghanistan had thanked her for being their voice at the tribunal:
Many people in Afghanistan saw the People’s Tribunal on TV, on YouTube, in the media, especially women, they secretly watched it, which was so important because they don’t have any way to be seen or heard, they can’t go to the streets and they can’t demonstrate or protest. This gives them hope.
The UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, who was present in both Madrid and The Hague, described the verdict as a milestone that represented a “powerful vindication for victims and survivors.” Bennett told AAN that, irrespective of any other impacts, the testimonies were a form of transitional justice:
The official record of a hearing where witnesses gave their testimonies will stand as an important part of the story of Afghanistan, the records of Afghanistan. Truth-seeking and truth-telling is a very important tool, and actually a right, in any kind of transitional justice process. It does not replace judicial accountability, but it complements it and has been found to be a very important affirmation in other countries as well to victims of human rights violations.
Several prominent international experts delivered messages of support at the closing of the session, in person or by video, including Dr Mustapha Sheikh, a professor of Islamic Studies at Leeds University in England, who called on Islamic scholars to speak up:
Afghan women are being subjected to discrimination, segregation, dehumanisation and systemic erasure. Because this cruelty is being justified through religious language, scholars of Islam have a heightened obligation to correct the misuse of Islamic law and to name this oppression for what it is.
The road ahead
The four NGOs that organised the tribunal issued a statement at the end of proceedings, concluding: “Afghan women have spoken. The judges have spoken. The law has spoken. Now the world must respond.”
With this verdict, the organisers and other activists will turn their attention to advocacy and more campaigning to build wider public support. Although the tribunal has no legal authority, its judgment can still have practical impacts. The findings could be helpful to prosecutors, whether at the ICC in their ongoing investigation, or national prosecutors pursuing investigations under universal jurisdiction in years to come. One of the prosecutors, Azada Raz Mohammad, said she hoped the tribunal’s evidence would serve as an important archive for prosecutors, as well as for the new UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan, which will support the work of prosecutors (for more on this mechanism, see this AAN report).
The findings could also influence the decisions of states as they debate their engagement policy with the IEA – the judges specifically reminded states of their duty to act under international law in the face of some of the most egregious crimes. For Director of DROPS, Mariam Safi, follow-up with diplomats will be key, particularly given what she described as her “utter frustration” at the “normalisation” of the Taliban. She listed the United States “speaking to the Taliban about reopening its embassies in Kabul,” and in the week the hearings took place, India inviting the Taliban foreign minister to visit, “Germany allowing Taliban authorities to enter the country in order to work in the consulates,” and regional countries “that have already accepted the credentials of the Taliban.”
Organisers hope that hearing the opinions of Islamic scholars in both the tribunal’s hearings and the verdict session of the tribunal will strengthen their advocacy with Muslim-majority states and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. This is not straightforward: Akbar said that some efforts had been made to hold the tribunal in Islamic countries, which “did not receive a positive signal,” though she notes they had limited time. Similarly, it was hard to find male Hanafi scholars to publicly support or participate in the hearings, though Mustapha Sheikh told AAN that this should not be understood “simply as indifference or tacit approval of the Taliban’s policies.” Rather, Sheikh said, “In many Muslim contexts shaped by colonial rule and its aftermath, political engagement by religious scholars has been securitised” so that organised religious activities of Muslims are perceived as a ‘threat’. As a result, Muslim scholars have internalised a form of defensive quietism, in which public engagement on issues framed as ‘political’ (human rights, gender justice, international law) is perceived as “endangering institutional survival, legal status or personal safety.”
There are precedents of Islamic scholars condemning aspects of the Emirate’s regime, however, which offer potential building blocks for activists wanting to take the findings of the tribunal forwards.
Lessons from other People’s Tribunals
People’s tribunals were born of frustration in earlier times, with the then diplomatic status quo. The first was the International War Crimes Tribunal in 1966, better known as the Russell Tribunal, which examined US aggression and war crimes in Vietnam.These tribunals differ in scope and context, but all were created to respond to grave abuses when formal institutions were unable or unwilling to act. The Permanent People’s Tribunal was set up in the 1970s and has now held over fifty sessions, including two previous sessions on Afghanistan in 1981 and 1982 to look at Soviet aggression and war crimes.
One of the inspirations for the Afghan People’s Tribunal was the Aban Tribunal, a tribunal set up by Iranian activists in 2021 to investigate the Iranian state’s violent response to protestors in 2019, which was carried out with impunity and under a media blackout. The main organiser, Shadi Sadr, told AAN that tribunals offer a powerful alternative at a time when international law and judicial mechanisms are in crisis:
Many atrocities are happening as we speak around the world, but the international justice system would be only capable of dealing with a very few of them and even [when] the international justice mechanisms are available, most of the time they are incapable of providing real justice and remedy to the victims. When it comes to women, the situation is even worse.
Women’s tribunals have drawn attention to the inequities of formal justice institutions, including the International Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, which pushed the Japanese state towards recognising and apologising for the use of rape and sexual slavery by Japan’s Imperial Army in the 1930s and 40s. The 2015 Women’s Court in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, also gave voice to the experiences of women who had been raped and sexually abused during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The beginning of accountability
The tribunal’s verdict was delivered in The Hague, symbolically important as the home of the International Criminal Court. While the court has already issued arrest warrants for gender persecution for Amir Hibatullah and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, the reclusive leaders are not likely to travel anywhere where they might be arrested, so their arrests seem a long way off. The ICC prosecutor could have requested additional arrest warrants for other Taliban leaders from the court, but as of November 2025, it had changed its policies so that the default approach will be to issue arrest warrants confidentially, so as not to deter arrest opportunities (MSN). The tribunal judges pointed out that there are also no current prosecutions under universal jurisdiction and encouraged states to make greater use of their ability – and duty – to investigate. All of this makes criminal accountability seem a rather distant prospect.
In this context, the tribunal’s decisive verdict, in The Hague, does have more than symbolic power. In helping establish a public record of the crimes perpetrated by the Taliban, it could influence diplomatic decisions and raise the cost of normalising relations with the Taliban, disrupting what Shaharzad Akbar described in her opening statement as “the crime of silence.” This tribunal, she said, puts victims and survivors at the heart of the process and “makes visible the invisible.” Akbar says that the message they want to send to the Taliban is that the world is standing with Afghan women, but that the normalisation trend makes it “hard to send that message now.”
If the volume of Afghan media coverage is any indication – organisers cited coverage by more than 20 Afghan outlets, including 18 hours of live broadcasting – the tribunal was a noteworthy event. If the Emirate pays any attention to the tribunal, it will no doubt be to dismiss it. For the organisers, however, the tribunal’s most enduring legacy is in the archive of testimony, the indictment and the judges’ verdict – material that can be used as tools for advocacy, public engagement and, potentially, future prosecutions. In his remarks after the verdict, Bennett said that too often victims are marginalised by justice mechanisms, whereas this tribunal “should serve as a model for future human rights efforts.”
For the women who testified, the hope is that being heard — on record, at the tribunal, and before the world — is not an end in itself, but the beginning of accountability. It may be many years before a criminal court hears their testimony, but as Witness 1 said: “I’m waiting for the day that I see the Taliban in front of a judge and the Taliban in prison.”
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
A Kabul street mural by the Afghan artist collective ArtLords reads: “A true Muslim is one whose words and actions do no harm to others (Hadith Sharif). Violence against women goes against the teachings of Islam.” Photo: ArtLords, 2017