Joint Protest StatementAfghanistan: A Return to the Age of Ignorance and the Legalization of Slavery

We, the Afghanistan Women's Movement for Equality and the Afghanistan Women's Organization for Equality, today, with hearts filled with anger and outrage, expose a document that represents a final blow to justice, humanity, and civil rights in Afghanistan. What has recently been approved by the Taliban leadership under the title of the Penal Regulations is not a codified legal framework; rather, it is an explicit manifesto of brutality and an official document for returning to the darkest depths of the Middle Ages. We firmly declare that this regulation has redefined the boundaries of crimes against humanity and has confronted the world with a phenomenon that the awakened conscience of humankind abolished centuries ago.

Within this system of pervasive discrimination, the Taliban have, through an unprecedented measure, slaughtered justice at the altar of a class-based social order. The division of society into four classes religious scholars, nobles, the middle class, and the lower class means that criminal acts are no longer judged according to the nature of the offense itself; instead, an individual’s social status determines the treatment they receive before the courts. Under this primitive logic, if members of the ruling elite and nobility commit crimes, they may be absolved with nothing more than a verbal reprimand, while the same act committed by ordinary citizens or members of the lower classes is met with the harshest forms of corporal punishment. This amounts to the official institutionalization of discrimination and the complete destruction of the principle of equality before the law.

Even more horrifying and shameful than this class-based hierarchy is the explicit legalization of slavery in the twenty-first century. At a time when the world is advancing toward new legal and human rights horizons, the Taliban have, with unprecedented audacity, employed the term slave in the text of their regulations and have granted the authority to impose punishment upon the owner.This return to a system in which one human being owns another transforms Afghanistan into a historical dungeon where the body and soul of a person can become the private property of someone else.

This catastrophe, alongside the consolidation of gender apartheid, has effectively erased female identity from social life. By criminalizing women’s voices and imposing mandatory full-face covering, the legal personality of half the population has been systematically assassinated. A woman whose voice is deemed “awrah” is, in practice, deprived of the right to seek justice and defend herself before the courts, leaving her vulnerable to structural violence and oppression.

At the same time, these regulations, through the indirect excommunication of non-Hanafi beliefs and by labeling followers of alternative religious interpretations as heretics,issue a dangerous green light for sectarian persecution. The lives, property, and security of religious minorities particularly Shi’a and Ismaili communities have been fundamentally endangered.

We hereby challenge all human rights organizations, independent media outlets, and the international community to put an end to this normalization of terror. Remaining silent in the face of a document that legalizes slavery and institutionalizes a class-based society is nothing less than complicity in crime. Through these regulations, the Taliban have declared war not only on the people of Afghanistan but on the universal values of humanity itself. We pledge to continue our civil and rights-based struggle from every platform and in every arena until these medieval decrees are completely abolished and a system founded upon equality and justice is established.

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