A new Taliban penal code signed by Hibatullah Akhundzada has sparked international outcry for institutionalizing gender discrimination by capping domestic abuse sentences at 15 days and criminalizing women’s basic movements and voices.
Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has signed a new “Penal Principles” code into law that effectively institutionalizes domestic violence in Afghanistan by ensuring abusers only face a maximum 15-day prison sentence if they cause “visible fractures or injuries.” Under the legislation, victims are burdened with proving abuse to a judge while remaining fully covered, and the code contains no provisions protecting children from physical, mental, or sexual assault. Human rights organization Rawadari warned that the law’s “totality of these provisions stands in clear contradiction to the principle of equality” and significantly increases the “risk of intensifying and institutionalising violence against women.”
The law further criminalizes women’s autonomy by mandating three months of imprisonment for those who visit family without a husband’s permission, complementing existing “vice and virtue” edicts that already ban women from looking at unrelated men or reading and singing in public. Rawadari maintains that the new code formalizes a system of gender-based discrimination, effectively rendering the female voice and presence “too intimate” for public life and stripping women of basic human dignity.
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